Just finished

I just finished reading ASP.NET MVC In Action. Great book. I highly recommend it. Most of the books about ASP.NET MVC just document the process of the author discovering and learning the MVC API. This book focuses on the big picture and describes how to use a variety of open source frameworks and libraries to build highly maintainable large scale applications with ASP.NET MVC.

Here is incomplete list of the libraries and frameworks that ASP.NET MVC In Action covers:

• NHibernate
• Rhino Mocks
• NUnit
• MVCContrib
• Automapper
• T4
• Spark View Engine
• Castle Windsor
• Castle Monorail
• JQuery
• JQuery Validation Plug-in
• JQuery Auto Complete Plug-in

My favorite chapter is chapter 12. Best practices for building maintainable applications by taking advantage of the ASP.NET MVC extension points to reduce code duplication and isolation of concerns.

To see all these concepts in action check out the CodeCampServer project.

Now Reading

The deal with reading is: You put one book down and pick 4 new ones up. Here are the books that I am reading at the moment:

Figure 1: The 4 books that I am reading at the moment

• Professional Twitter Development
• PHP and MySQL Web Development
• LINQ in Action
• Jooma! 1.5: A User’s Guide

On Its Way

I need to get up to speed with scaffolding frameworks in PHP. Symphony seems to be the most promising. I just ordered the Definite Guide to Symfony. And I need to admit, none of these books are work related, there are all just for fun reading.