Krzysztof Koźmic's blog

As some of you know, I’m not a web devel­oper. I had a short affair with web­forms, which ended… quickly leav­ing bad taste in my mouth. How­ever it’s hard to ignore pos­i­tive buzz around Microsoft’s “other” frame­work for build­ing web appli­ca­tions – namely ASP.NET MVC. Espe­cially it’s hard to ignore that the buzz comes from peo­ple I know, respect and hope they know what they’re talk­ing about. I was quite happy to see that some of these peo­ple wrote a book about this frame­work so I decided to pick it up. I was expect­ing a great book, and a great book I got.

ASP.NET MVC in Action, judg­ing from the title has a clear pur­pose – bring­ing you up to speed with the said frame­work. Most ‘frame­work’ (or lan­guage) books take an easy approach to the task – you get basi­cally anno­tated spec­i­fi­ca­tion with few bet­ter or worse sam­ples and you’re left with fig­ur­ing out (based on your own mis­takes most of the time), which ele­ments to use, and which not, how to use the framework/language in broader con­text of appli­ca­tion and how to lever­age its strengths to build testable, main­tain­able appli­ca­tion that you ship and hope­fully make money on. So is this book like that – no, and that’s its sin­gle great­est feature.

While the book does a good job at teach­ing you how to use the frame­work, it’s as much about the frame­work as about prin­ci­ples. I didn’t count but in the first chap­ter alone, I think word ‘testable’ appears more time than the word ‘MVC’. You get to learn about main­tain­abil­ity as much as about view helpers, onion archi­tec­ture, as much as about con­troller actions… I think you get the idea.

But wait – there’s more. ASP.NET MVC is not a lonely island, it enters an exist­ing (and grow­ing) ecosys­tem of other tools and frame­works. The authors acknowl­edge that fact, and take full advan­tage of it. As as result of that you’ll learn as much about the framework’s API, as about how to plug it with extend­ing projects (MVC­Con­trib) how to use it in con­junc­tion with IoC con­tain­ers, per­sis­tence frame­works etc. All that while still keep­ing an eye on main­tain­abil­ity and proven prac­tices. And to help you choose wisely, it con­tains an entire chap­ters ded­i­cated to direct com­peti­tors of ASP.NET MVC – Cas­tle Mono­rail, and Ruby on Rails.

While no book can make you a bet­ter devel­oper by itself, they can be a great help in point­ing you into right direc­tions, guid­ing you to avoid pit­falls and com­mon mis­takes, and this by all means is such a book.

I used to be a big fan of fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion books back in a day. I read a ton of books by David Eddings, Mer­cedes Lackey, R. A. Sal­va­tore, Janusz A. Zajdel and count­less other authors. I’m still com­plet­ing my col­lec­tion of Dis­c­world books, and try­ing to find some time to read the mon­strous (1000+ pages) Lód by Jacek Dukaj. When Prag­matic Book­shelf released their first non-technical book, “The Seed of Hope”, I thought it might be an inter­est­ing ven­ture – fan­tasy book by tech­ni­cal publisher.

We get quite a stan­dard story, vari­a­tions of which I’ve seen many times, so if you’re expect­ing some rev­o­lu­tion­ary plot… there isn’t any. We get the vari­a­tion of an usual tale of an orphan child going on a trip to unveil its des­tiny and save the world along the way with the small help of some friends and their mag­i­cal tal­ents that they learn as they go.

That in itself is not a down­side by any means, the whole Bel­gar­iad saga (five books, 500+ pages each)  are basi­cally fol­low­ing the same idea, with Mal­loreon (yet 5 more books) reit­er­at­ing it once again, and I had a blast read­ing them, although it was close to ten years ago.

I didn’t have a lot of fun read­ing The Seed of Hope though. First of all, the book is short — less than 300 pages, and it feels like a 700 pages book stripped of con­tent to fit on the lim­ited num­ber of pages. This in turns forced the author to take a lot of short­cuts, not go into a lot of details, and as a result of that – the whole story feels flat. The world is pale, the char­ac­ters shal­low, and the sto­ry­telling just scratches the sur­face of the poten­tial of the world. We don’t get to know the char­ac­ters well enough to really under­stand their moti­va­tions, and their actions often felt ran­dom to me. The big story turn­ing point when good char­ac­ters crosses to the dark side felt naive for that very reason.

So we end up with a mediocre book. Not a bad one, as it has all the required parts, but the exe­cu­tion leaves a lot to be desired. I think espe­cially younger read­ers will find it worth­while. On the bright side, it moti­vated me to pick up that Carpe Jugu­lum, that I’ve been mean­ing to read for quite some time.