First, you should place your advance order for ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action at http://manning.com/palermo2. That way, you will receive the printed book even before you see it at your local bookstore.
The entire book is finished, and we are just moving through production right now. But that doesn’t mean you have to wait to read it and learn about ASP.NET MVC 2. Since the beginning of the book project, you have been able to see the progression of the book on GitHub, our project site and version control system. That’s right, version control is for more than just code!
Head over to http://github.com/jeffreypalermo/mvc2inaction and go to the “manuscript” folder to read the entire book in Word document form. All the content is there. In fact, the Word documents for the 1st edition is there as well. You can see just how much we have expanded the 2nd edition to not only cover version 2 but also to incorporate lessons learned using the framework over the last 2 years.
You will notice that the raw files in GitHub are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. That means you can use the content in blog posts, whitepapers, and you can use the code samples in any way you like. The only restriction, really, is that you have to give us credit if you republish portions of it (and you can NOT republish the full work, of course), and you can’t resell our work. Other than that, use it the best way you can. We hope it is a great learning tool for you, and we hope that releasing the raw files early help you get a jump-start learning about ASP.NET MVC 2.
Credits:
Authors: Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, Jimmy Bogard, Eric Hexter, Matt Hinze
Technical Editor: Jeremy Skinner
Foreword: Phil Haack
P.S. I wish I could say that we are pioneers in this, but I have personally benefited from two others I know about who have worked on their books “out in the open”:
- Iron Ruby in Action (available during writing)
- The Art of Agile Development (need to sign in to Yahoo)