I hate code samples in technical books! No seriously, this is bile I’m not afraid to give a permalink to (nor am I afraid to end a sentence with a preposition, so there!).

Even the shortest code samples are a pain to type in. And if they show anything reasonably interesting, they’re probably too long to type in.

Of course, nobody actually types in the sample code, they grab the code from the companion CD (blech!) or download zip files containing the code from the companion website.

With Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 (print edition | kindle edition) we experimented with a different approach. We made our sample code available as NuGet packages.

It seemed fitting given that ASP.NET MVC 3 included NuGet 1.0 as part of the product. The benefit of this approach is that there’s no fiddling around with downloading and unpacking files and copying source files into the right place.

Throughout the book, you’ll run into a call-out with a command that says something like Install-Package Wrox.SomethingOrOther. If you’re following along with an ASP.NET MVC 3 project open in Visual Studio, it’s as easy as installing that package and you have the source code nicely organized and immediately runnable!

Along with the easily installable code samples, the book covers all the cool new features of ASP.NET MVC 3 including EF Code First Scaffolding, NuGet, and Razor.

For those that like to dig deeper, the book covers the concept of dependency injection and ASP.NET MVC 3’s support for it as well as Test Driven Development (TDD) with ASP.NET MVC. These chapters were written by Brad Wilson, who’s also a co-author of the xUnit.net unit test framework.

Along with Brad, I had the pleasure of also working with Jon Galloway and K. Scott Allen. This was a bit of a reunion for K. Scott, Jon, and I as we co-authored a book with Jeff Atwood (aka CodingHorror) a lifetime ago.

Since Brad and I are on the product team, we were able to sprinkle in behind-the-scene tidbits from the product team that provide insight into how or why certain decisions were made when it came to the product design.

If you read the book (again, available in both a print edition and a kindle edition. Don’t be shy about collecting them all! Winking smile), please do write a review on Amazon.com. We appreciate all the feedback we can get and already have ideas on how to improve the next one!

Also, a lot of folks have asked me why the Kindle is priced more than the paperback in some areas. We’re not really in control of that. The suggested retail price of the two editions are exactly the same, but Amazon provides different discounts for each edition.

As to the question, why are the suggested retail prices the same? I really don’t know but I plan to suggest that the electronic edition ought to be cheaper.