Modern Web Development with ASP.NET Core 3 - Second Edition: An end to end guide covering the latest features of Visual Studio 2019, Blazor and Entity Framework 2nd ed. Edition

Full disclosure:Packt Publishing sent me a free review copy of this book, I had the lead co-author role for a recent Packt book, and I had a technical reviewer role for another Packt book. This background had no impact on my review of this book.Summary:Written by a heavyweight team of authors, this book assumes a reader with a comfortable ASP.NET MVC background, and literacy with technologies central to .Net web development: ASP.net, C#, combined with HTML and CSS. It covers ASP.NET development in a modern world that features GitHub and Linux.* product spaces. Built in three sections• The Fundamentals of ASP.NET Core 3• Improving Productivity• Advanced Topicseach section drills down into component topics, often enough almost in a story-arc way. For example, Chapter 1 introduces Razor class libraries as a way to blend C# and HTML, and to control the behavior of .Net application engineering. Chapter 4 slightly covers Razor, integrating the topic with Controller engineering, Chapter 5 covers it more, and Chapter 7 covers it exclusively and at length.The good stuff:The broad topic coverage of a broad topic space works well, touching on the issues that will matter and count, at least for the “foreseeable” future. It’s good to see the authors recognize the merits of “old,” proven technology – for example, they discuss AJAX in Chapter 6 (Using Forms and Models) – essentially forcing modern ASP.NET Core technology to accept AJAX with a little bit of creative jQuery.The not-so-good stuff:Although the authors provide a large number of code samples, and carefully describe the engineering of those samples in the surrounding chapter text, heavier and more detailed comments would only work better, especially in the code samples for this book – all available at the Packt website. Comments don’t matter very much – until a developer needs them.What I’d like to see:VB.net coverage of the topics would be welcome, but at almost 750 pages, that might become unrealistic for a book that size. An exclusively VB.net version of this book would clearly work. Awhile back, Visual Basic had a huge presence in the front-end web development space. Visual Basic has evolved into modern VB.net, which essentially clones C#. Fast forward to now, and VB.net (Visual Basic) has become more of a guilty pleasure, overshadowed by C#. Still, VB.net has plenty of merit.In the preface, the authors do explain Visual Studio 2019 – at least the Community edition – as a prerequisite, and this makes sense in the modern world because earlier Visual Studio versions won’t necessarily have the needed feature space. Still, coverage of older Visual Studio technologies would be welcome. This could mean separate editions for earlier Visual Studio editions, fully recognizing that the feature spaces of those Visual Studio products might not match the topics covered in this book.Wrap-up:Modern Web Development with ASP.NET Core 3 Second Edition covers a heavy topic space – modern ASP.NET development – in a necessarily heavy way. Because of its broad topic coverage, the book lends itself to use as a textbook, for a formal class or focused self-study. It also works well as a reference resource.

This book breaks ot down to a simple method of implementation of asp web design, o would suggest looking at angular first especially if your into dynamic web pages .

Disclaimer:Please note that I received this complementary from the publisher, Packt, in electronic (PDF) format. My review is not affected in any way by the fact that I received this free of charge. I am not a professional reviewer but hopefully this helps to explain my experience reading it. I have not yet gone through all of the examples but I believe they are all coded in a properly structured manner.Summary:This is a well-written book featuring many high-level concepts and it does cover a lot of ground regarding building reliable and secure ASP.NET Core apps. All of the chapters are well-organized and overall it is a fairly straightforward read. There is a significant amount of material regarding this amazing framework including its thorough history and helps to learn how it progressed through the years going all the way back to Active Server Pages (ASP). It provides excellent coverage of configuration and settings aspects. I suggest working through all of the example code to aid in understanding all information. The source is available through github using the link provided on page 3 and throughout the chapters.I find the explanations of dependency injection (DI) to be quite helpful. The author, Mr. Peres, clearly explains how to access services and how ASP.NET Core can be extended and customized to fit your needs. There are extensive explanations of Model-View-Controller (MVC), including Razor in chapter 7 (both pages and views), Entity framework and also Web API in chapter 8. Swagger is mentioned as well and I actually use it in my own work; it is certainly recommendable to learn that. In addition, there is really helpful advice on globalization in chapter 4 and how to support multiple languages in your web app.There are code examples of most, if not all, concepts which I have read so far in every chapter. This book has a great deal of material on how to effectively build a web app using C# and .NET Core. The versions 2.2, 3.0, are covered. I think 3.1 is also. The author does a fantastic job teaching advanced topics such as implementation of custom middleware as well.To sum up, I definitely recommend this book especially for intermediate to advanced level developers, wanting to build modern web apps using this technology. Some advanced chapters regarding exciting topics such as performance and scaling, unit testing, gRPC, Blazor and real-time communication with SignalR are covered. I particularly enjoyed reading about how to implement AJAX in .NET Core; to me, it is great the author included that because I have not seen much regarding this in other (web development) books that I have read.In my opinion, this book could easily be part of coursework, and it serves as an excellent reference giving a plethora of resources to learn .NET Core development. Like with other technical literature, there is definitely a great deal of knowledge to absorb here (including a lot of details to examine) but that is always a good thing!

I don't understand why the author wrote such a book. It does not explain anything in clear terms step by step. It does not explain the logic behind. There is no solid example in the book.Here is the deal: If you are a beginner, this book is not for you. You will not learn anything from it, it will actually confuse you. If you are intermediate and higher, you should be able to read the microsoft documents and tutorials without a problem. Unlike this book, which scatters things on the table without any structure, the online microsoft documents and tutorials are structured, more comprehensive and much more clear. Frankly, I would recommend completely skipping this book. Adam Freeman's book is much better for begiiners.

Bought as a reference.

It's absurd that a book of this (small) size try to appeal both to beginners and advanced readers. At the end, it's mostly a book for beginners.