Maarten starts the book as most books are written, with an
introductory chapter giving general information about the topic. This is to be
expected from any book. If you have some familiarity with MVC, I recommend
skipping the chapter. If you are completely new to MVC then certainly read on
from the beginning.
He very quickly dives into creating the first application
with ASP.NET MVC, but takes care not to delve too deeply into the details just
yet. Since he dives right in, he is mostly just skimming over details to get
the reader into MVC.
Interacting with MVC, information about the framework, and
routing are in the chapters to follow. This is when the meat of the book really
starts talking about MVC details. These are the chapters that you will really
want to understand since they are the core components of MVC.
In the later part of the book, Maarten covers customizations
you can perform on MVC using ASP.NET forms with ASP.NET MVC and keeping user
experiences rich with AJAX.
One topic that everyone else seems to see as central to MVC
is testing, so of course he added information on testing the application at the
end of the book. I admit that I write unit tests and use testing to ensure
quality and maintainability in the code I write, but I am against the idea that
MVC is designed the way it is for testing purposes. MVC is a pattern that
separates concerns in ways which allow testing to be achieved. In general, it
is a pattern which should give more control to the developer than the forms
model did. This is the power of MVC.
