ASP.NET Core Application Development: Building an application in four sprints (Developer Reference) 1st Edition

I'm so glad I found this book! It should be called "Application Development - all the details you need to know" because it's really all about developing a modern application from scratch using a team approach (even if you are a team of 1). I highly recommend it as the first book to read on application development in 2017. This is absolutely the book you should start with... even if you don't know if you want to do ASP.NET Core or Azure. It should be required reading for all programmer and students that want to understand modern programming. It talks about a lot of the subjects, including all the client side technologies, plus other considerations, like cache, that you will need to know and tells you what works, what's up and coming, and what is outdated and why.Don't worry if you don't understand everything. Read it through once, and take notes on the technologies you need to learn - it will really help you get the big picture. Then go to Pluralsight or Udemy or one of the other training sites and look at the Prerequisites you are going to need for each of the technologies. It took me days just to write down all the things I needed to learn and figure out the order to do what I wanted to do. I kept highlighting sections of the text and putting margin notes saying "use this" and "don't use this" as they talk you through the process of putting together and team, deciding on the technologies to use, and writing the application, testing it, and putting it up on the web.Before this book, for example, I already knew html5 and css and some javascript and jquery. But I had no idea that there are probably a hundred frameworks and that a lot of CSS can be more automated. So the basics learned in a programming class is only the very beginning of what you need to know. This book also has lots of tips and cautions and common sense that you may not have thought about.This book teaches application development through the eyes of a team going through the steps in a programming project, it isn't really a follow-along coding book on asp.net core, or in-depth reference on asp.net core. If that is what you are looking for then buy something else or take one of the online courses. But do you even know if that is what you really want to learn, or if you are up to speed on all the prerequisites? Read this book first before doing anything else. It's a fun easy to read book that won't take that long, well worth your time unless you are already an advanced asp.net mvc programmer.I agree that the book is a little out of order. And there are a few areas where the 3 authors seem to disagree slightly. And I think the book should have some sort of flow chart in the beginning that follows through the book so you can visually see how each section of each chapter fits into the big picture... I intend to create this for myself and then read the book a second time. There is just so much information in this book and ASP.NET Core is a part of what they talk about, but there is so much more they consider in writing a quality application. For example, which add-ins you need for Visual Studio, or what to use if you aren't going to use Visual Studio.Just read it. Highly recommended even if you aren't doing ASP.NET Core. I have a much better and more accurate picture of how everything fits together and the process of creating an application now that I've read it.If you actually read all of the book, you know that it's worth more than 3 stars just for the education on how to write an quality modern application. Sure it might be a 3 star ASP.NET Core book because it doesn't let you program along with it, and skips around. But if it were named more accurately it would be a 5 star book, one that everyone should read if they want to write quality applications without taking months sifting through the web to figure out which of the technologies to use and how to write it.

This is an odd book. I started reading it in the hope that it would walk me through the process of creating an ASP.NET MVC application. I'm an experienced ASP.NET Web Forms developer, but I've had only a little exposure to ASP.NET MVC. So I've been wanting to learn more about it. This book doesn't really walk you through creating an application, in the way that a normal programming book might. Instead, it sets up a fictional scenario, where a development team is creating a new web site for a ski lodge, and uses that as a jumping-off point to explore different aspects of ASP.NET MVC. Over the course of 24 chapters, it covers quite a lot of topics. For many of them, it's really only a cursory review; you need to look elsewhere for detail. (The book includes a lot of links to web resources for more detail.)The narrative of the fictional dev team is sometimes entertaining, and often corny. It helps tie things together. Some readers will like it, and others will roll their eyes and groan. (It's easy enough to skip it, if it bothers you.)There is an example application that goes along with this book, and which can be found at Github, but I found it too complicated to really get much out of. (Though maybe I should spend more time studying it, now that I've finished reading the book.)While this book wasn't exactly what I was looking for, I found it to be a great help in understanding the current state of ASP.NET web development.

I really loved this book. The "story" of the evolution of the development team, learning to use ASP.NET Core was fantastic, and often quite humorous. I think the best part was that I felt like I was learning ASP.NET Core application development right along with the characters in the story. The technical descriptions of the features of ASP.NET Core are superb, and this has become my favorite "handbook" when developing new systems "from scratch." I can easily find perfect examples, instructions, and explanations that help me to understand the difference between Core 1.1 development and older ASP.NET development methodologies. Superb book!

This book is well written and well planned to give the reader a good foundation of understanding and real world scenarios to better understand the new world of ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core brings a powerful set of new tools, but also a lot of changes to the old ways of doing things. This book makes an excellent guide to get you up to speed and provide a rich resource going beyond the basics.The authors have put together a lot of great info!

Dated wish i knew before buying

This book is quite hard to follow. It is like they are trying to tell a story but that makes it hard to find the information you need. They put chapters on Azure, Containers, and Cross-Platform before chapters like Entity Framework, Views, and Configuration which can really confuse people as these are more advanced concepts and, IMHO, should appear towards the end of the book.

The first part of the book was a nice overview of .Net Core and how it is different from previous versions of .Net. The downfall of the book is that the keep steps are missed. I never did find where the author walked you through setting up the project initially and setup the db initially. While the content looks really solid, there are steps missing which are preventing me from executing any of the dotnet ef examples.