Packt Publishing recently released a new title – Instant Razor View Engine authored by Abhimanyu Kumar Vatsa. I  received a free copy of this book from the author and agreed to read and write the review.

This book turned out to be a nice and quick introduction of Razor view engine. The approach of the book made it very easy to follow and learn. This book start with creating a basic ASP.NET MVC project and quick introduction to the ASP.NET MVC. This also talks about difference between Razor and ASP.NET View Engine. Slowly it will take you through inline codes, block codes, mixed codes, conditional and repetitive statements, layouts and nested layouts, directives, scaffolding, and model directives. This books also covers the helpers with extension also gives and quick overview of partial views.

 

 

 

The content of the book looks like :

• Creating the project (Should know) :
  • In this section author discussed about the creation of ASP.NET MVC Project and ran through the basic introduction ASP.NET MVC and a very quick introduction of Razor View Engine and how this differ with ASP.Net View Engine. 
• Fundamental Razor syntaxes (Must know) :
  • A quick deep dive into code expressions, code block, expressions, mixed code expressions, conditional statements and  basic loops are covered in this chapter. In this chapter, Abhimanyu also explained how the language parsers works in different situation with some nice example.
• Razor layout pages (Become an expert):
  • Here author introduces all the concepts of layout pages, nested layout pages, RenderBody, RenderSection. All the concepts are clearly explained with examples.
• Models in Razor (Must know):
  • Talks about model directives, scaffolding views – and best thing is, author managed the things to explain very well using a sample “ToDo” application.
• Razor helpers (Must know) :
  • Discussed about helpers with extension methods, declarative syntax, and standard helpers and how to apply them in different scenarios.
• Partial views (Should know):
  • This section explains about render partial views using Partial, RenderPartial, Action, and RenderAction helper methods.

 

 

My Thoughts

Here is the couple of points I wants to highlights about the book, of course both positive and negative points. 

• Very nice introduction of Razor View Engine for beginners and for anyone who wants to recap the Razor view engine very quickly.
• Each chapter is very well through out and steps you through the details of every syntax and the out puts.
• Concepts are clearly written and output are explained very nicely with screen shots and annotation.
• Easy to learn and grab things. Clearly written with very simple language and examples.

• In the starting of the book, few basic thing are explained ( loops, statements ) in too much details  and looks very repetitive. Where as in the end, couple of important concepts are explained in hurry. Author could have adjusted the pages for important concepts.

Overall Rating 

 

 

All in all this book is a really nice introduction of Razor View Engine with ASP.NET MVC and well presented. I can recommend it to any one who is new in the technology or want to quickly recap.

Disclosure Note: The book was provided to me free by the Author to read and review. This is my own review. Neither the publisher nor the author has seen it before I published it, nor prompted me or influence me in any way.