Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard, real community leaders, have written the ASP.NET MVC in Action book. I did have the honour to review the MS of the book in very early stages. They were already writing this book when ASP.NET MVC was still in a preview stadium.

Although I followed the development of ASP.NET MVC, I didn’t have time to try every feature. After the final release of ASP.NET MVC this book helped me better understand ASP.NET MVC. Reading this book will give you control over ASP.NET MVC. If you want to learn ASP.NET MVC this book will really help you. It covers best practices and recipes. Besides all the basics, you will really get at speed level if you combine reading sessions with development sessions.

It took the authors of NHibernate in Action a very long time to complete this book. It was already in the summer of 2006 that I got involved in the NHibernate in Action book. First steps were basically reviewing the first chapters manuscript. Later on I also reviewed other chapters. About half a year ago, or maybe it was even three quarter of a year ago (time goes fast these days), Manning asked me to do the Technical Proofreading of NHïbernate in Action. In het end the book finally got to print. And yes I really like it. Although I would have been very happy to have this book in the year 2006, I’m glad to have it now. Besides the fact that this is a NHibernate book, it also covers ORM in general. And a lot patterns and concepts discussed in this book apply to other ORMs as well, like Linq2SQL and the Entity Framework.

It's already a year ago when I read the first piece of Silverlight in Action. At that time it was still called Silverlight 1.1. But now Silverlight 2 In Action by Chad A. Campbell and John Stockton is in print.

I really like this book, it helped me learn Silverlight, so I recommend this book to everyone into learning Silverlight 2.

It covers all the stuff you need to know about Silverlight, including:

• Interaction with the old web
• Layout and text
• User interaction
• Data binding
• Networking and communications
• Digital media
• Graphics and transforms
• Animation
• Styling
• Distribution and deployment

Some time ago I did the technical review of the Manning Book Test Driven by Lasse Koskela. The book is available since October 10th.

The book is devided in three rough parts: Part 1, A TDD primer; Part 2,  Applying TDD to specific technologies; Part 3, Building products with acceptance TDD.

Part 1, A TDD primer: This part is about Testing in general and covers refactoring and patterns as well. Everything is written with Test Driven Development in mind. So don't expect all possible refactorings and patterns covered here.

Part 2, Applying TDD to specific technologies: This part covers testing on specific technologies. Where the first part can help people start testing, the second part will help people continue testing even if the more complicated tests need to be written. Specially complex testing on Web components, data access, etc.

Part 3, Building products with acceptance TDD: The last part covers more on acceptance testing. I haven't got any experience with automated acceptance testing but this part covers it quite well.

Although this book has some influence from the Java world almost everything can be applied within other technology worlds as well, like .NET, Ruby and PHP. I like this book and will use it every once in a while to keep myself focused.

Some time ago I did the technical proofreading of the Manning book PHP in Action by Dagfinn Reiersol. The book is available since the end of June. During the technical proofreading and even before this during the normal review, I began to really like this book. It's about building PHP applications, but doesn't stop after "Hello, world!". Not it doesn't stop there at all, PHP in Action covers a lot of practices for building more enterprise like PHP applications and also covers design patterns. Although I'm not longer a active PHP developer I really thing that every self-respecting php-developer should have this book on his bookshelf.