I Love it When Technical Book Authors Have a Sense of Humor

I am going through Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework by Adam Freeman and Steven Sanderson (@StevenSanderson) (Apress). Enjoying it so far – good technical writing, good level of detail mixed with useful examples of different implementation options.

And most importantly, they have a good sense of humor. From Page 381 (my highlights):

If you don’t want to click on the link, they are talking about best practices for url schemas using MVC, and give an example of a link to Amazon as something not to do (I realize the irony of my linking to Amazon above). They then include in an aside:

Note To be very clear, we have only the highest respect for Amazon, who sells more of our books than everyone else combined. We know for a fact that each and every member of the Amazon team is a strikingly intelligent and beautiful person. Not one of them would be so petty as to stop selling our books over something so minor as criticism of their URL format. We love amazon. We adore Amazon. We just wish they would fix their URLs

.Another good one: The authors are talking about using MVC to create a REST API, where the same action name in a given controller can be overridden to handle HTTP Get/Post/Delete requests (page 476, my emphasis):

Now each StaffMember entity in our application can be uniquely addressed using a URL of the form Staff/123, and a client can use the GET, POST, and DELETE HTTP methods to perform operations on those addresses. This is called a RESTful API, except by people who claim to be experts in REST, who will tell you that nothing is truly RESTful except their own code. (We joke—sort of).

Gotta love it.