In the previous years “n books for a .NET Summer reading list” used to be the title of the book list post. Now, in the last of my 4 posts with books suggestions I am back to the original title. In my introductory post I said I would have listed only a few web development on .NET books. In fact there are only 2.

Web Development on .NET

Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

While Professional ASP.NET MVC v2 was mainly an update of the original professional MVC1 book, the third remake, due to the nature of the new features introduced in MVC3, is much more than that. It obviously covers Razor, the new validation features, the view and controllers' scaffolding and so on. But also introduces NuGet, the new package manager introduced with MVC3, but not only for MVC, and some content that were missing in the previous edition of the book, like Dependency Injection, Unit Testing, Extensibility and Security. Seems like this is becoming a good MVC book at the end. Also available as Kindle ebook.

Umbraco User's Guide

This is the first book on Umbraco ever published, and targets both developers and the umbraco admins. It covers all the aspects of Umbraco development, from the installation, to the setup of the development environment, to the best practices for developing Document Types and organizing templates.

If you are like me, and need to get up to speed with everything you need to know to develop sites with Umbraco, this is the book for you. And even if you did something already, but want to make sure you are on the right track with the best practices, this book will teach you some new tricks. Also available as Kindle ebook.

NHibernate

NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide

As the title says, this is really the Beginner's guide to NHibernate. Starts from the basics of an ORM and builds up till more advanced scenario. But if you already know about NHibernate, even if you might find some interesting concepts or maybe some theory, I recommend you read the next book, still published from PacktPub.

NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook

If already know NHibernate, and want to get deeper into it, this is definitely the book for you: covers FluentNH, ConfORM, best practices to use NH inside ASP.NET MVC, and even touches the NHibernate Contrib projests (cache, spatial, full-text). It think this the best book on NHibernate around. Also available as Kindle ebook.

UX, Presentation, Blogging

Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web

Lukas Mathis, probably more famous as the author of the blog IgnoreTheCode.net, is probably one of the few UX/UI designer that I read: why? Because he is the only I know that doesn't write obvious advices or complains for the sake of it. I know that writing tutorials and "poems" that cover basic UI concepts is what the average audience want to read, but for someone with a bit of common sense they are too obvious. The book follows the same approach: instead of giving obvious advices (at least to me and to developers that don't only care about writing one line of code after the other), like the overrated Don't make me think, he covers all the techniques and also a bit of theory needed for the design of an application from the usability standpoint; and you'll be able to autonomously come out with the same advices the other books give you.

Have you ever heard the sentence "Give them a fish and you'll feed them for one day, teach them how to fish and you'll feed them for the rest of their life"? This book is about teaching how to fish.

Confessions of a Public Speaker

Scott Berkun gives out proven techniques for delivering doing kick-ass presentations.
108 5-star out of 127 reviews (and the 19 remaining except 4 are 4 stars). Do you need more?
And finally, to avoid misunderstandings: this is not about how to structure your presentation, how to write slides and so on. Also available as Kindle ebook.

Technical Blogging

Still to be published, but available in “beta” (10 chapters out of 16 are ready) this book promises to teach you how to keep a technical blog that is also read by people and that can earn you some additional income. Buy the beta version and get updates as soon as they come out.

That’s all for this summer

During the last 2 weeks I published a list of the 22 books I liked reading or that I’m planning to read soon.

Hope you found some good books to read for the next months.