What Books Should I Read to Learn ASP.NET Core and Blazor?

D. Esposito, Programming ASP.NET Core. Microsoft Press, 2018.

This book is seven years old. It’s missing three quarters of the lifetime of ASP.NET Core. When you combine that with it being “tailor-made for existing ASP.NET developers especially those with an MVC background,” I can see I won’t get much value from it.

A. Tanure, ASP.NET Core 9.0 Essentials. Packt Publishing, 2025.

The grammar in the introduction was atrocious, and I didn’t enjoy the author’s writing style. It also proposes that cloud environments and complex web applications that use more than four technologies are brand new. It claims to take a theoretical and practical approach to a wide tech stack, in only 348 pages. I don’t buy it.

M. J. Price, Apps and Services with .NET 8, Second Edition. Packt Publishing, 2023. 

This is yet another high-level overview of a long list of topics by Price. This book specifically covers things directly relevant to my career. The parts I won’t use, such as .NET MAUI, are such a small portion of the content that they won’t dissuade me from choosing this book. Some content “included” in the book is an online link, which I find odd.

A. Lock, ASP.NET Core in Action, Third Edition. Manning, 2023.

I’m very excited about this book. It is a structured tour of most of web development with ASP.NET. The author starts simple and adds complexity, covering each topic in depth. I will need to learn Blazor, SignalR, and gRPC from another book, though, since they aren’t covered here. This is a very strong contender.

A. Freeman, Pro ASP.NET Core 7, Tenth Edition. Manning, 2023.

I’m also very excited about this book. It is another structured tour of most of web development with ASP.NET. Just like Lock, Freeman starts simple and adds complexity, covering each topic in depth. Freeman covers Blazor, but omits SignalR and gRPC as Lock does. This is another very strong contender. I’ll need to choose between Freeman and Lock, since the overlap is so strong.

C. Nagel, Professional C# and .NET, 2021 Edition. Wrox, 2021.

I mis-categorized this book in a recent blog post. I didn’t realize just how much of the platform it covers. Not only are C# and .NET introduced, but web apps using ASP.NET and desktop apps using WinUI are covered. This puts it in competition with Price, Lock, and Freeman, rather than Michaelis, Albahari, Troelsen, and Griffiths. I didn’t like Nagel’s writing style in the preface nearly as much as Price’s, so this book isn’t for me.

A. Troelsen and P. Japikse, Pro C# 10 with .NET 6: Foundational Principles and Practices in Programming. Apress, 2022.

The preface’s multiple typographical and grammatical issues make me nervous. This book also has the same breadth problem as Nagel’s, but covering different topics: memory management, metaprogramming, ADO.NET & EF Core, WPF, and ASP.NET. At 1,705 pages it probably has enough depth, but I’d rather pick a couple more focused and up-to-date books.

C. Marcotte, An Atypical ASP.NET Core 6 Design Patterns Guide, Second Edition. Packt Publishing, 2022.

The title and the front matter don’t match. It doesn’t cover any design patterns in the first 200 pages, and the last 300 pages cover architecture. I am not completely discounting this book, but I won’t read it soon.

D. Metzgar, .NET in Action, Second Edition. Manning, 2024.

I completely misjudged this book based purely on its title and cover. The front matter reveals that it covers more topics (ASP.NET, testing, containerization, security, and performance profiling) than I guessed. It also doesn’t seem to spend much time on the Base Class Library. Its coverage of real-world, applied topics that I haven’t seen in many other books means this definitely earns a spot further down my to-read list.

J. Smith, Entity Framework Core in Action, Second Edition. Manning, 2021.

My exposure to ORMs is limited to working knowledge of Ruby on Rails’s ActiveRecord. This book looks like it will give me more than just working knowledge. By the time I finish it, I should be an expert with Entity Framework Core. This goes onto my must-read list.

V. De Sanctis, Building Web APIs with ASP.NET Core. Manning, 2023.

I’m already quite familiar with using and designing RESTful Web APIs. So, I’ll get little value from the parts that teach REST, authentication, versioning, CORS, documentation, and the like. I also have no immediate need for gRPC or GraphQL, which this book also touches upon. The balance of the book seems to be things I can learn from one of the other books. While this seems like a quality book, it’s not for me right now.

X. Yan, Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8. Packt Publishing, 2024.

The Preface mentions a Chapter 18, “Leveraging Open-Source Frameworks,” that the Table of Contents does not. The O’Reilly Learning Platform’s copy of the book only has 17 chapters. That’s weird, and either indicates a sloppy publisher omitting an entire chapter, or a sloppy author describing a chapter that was cut.

My evaluation of De Sanctis’s work largely applies here. Yan covers SignalR, though, so I might dip into Chapter 13 unless another work I read covers it. The coverage of DDD, observability, Azure Pipelines, and GitHub Actions seems a bit out-of-place, but I suppose more (correct) information is usually better.

A. Freeman, Pro ASP.NET Core Identity: Under the Hood with Authentication and Authorization in ASP.NET Core 5 and 6 Applications. Apress, 2021.

Another entry from Freeman! I prefer Rails 8’s auth generator to Devise. Devise works well for your standard free B2C applications, but the “auth & auth” needs of SaaS applications vary wildly. You’ll usually end up building something bespoke anyways. That said, I would rather learn and understand a system before I reject it. I should give ASP.NET Core Identity that fair shake. This book seems like a great, in-depth way to learn deeply about it without committing to using it before I’m ready.

M. Brind, ASP.NET Core Razor Pages in Action. Manning, 2022.

The statement found in the preface, that “Microsoft recommends starting with Razor Pages for all new web development that involves generating the UI on the server (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choose-web-ui)”, is no longer true. Between that fact, the fact that I’m learning .NET for Blazor, and the fact that other books will cover Razor Pages at a high-level, I will pass on this book.

D. Pine, Learning Blazor. O’Reilly Media, 2022.

The foreword is a warning: “it doesn’t just focus on the easy parts […] and leave real-world complexity as an exercise,” and “with some focus, you’ll be able to absorb” the content. That’s unusual, and I’m intrigued rather than deterred. It does feel out-of-place for a Learning ␣ book from O’Reilly, though.

The author chose to introduce the reader to an existing application rather than building from scratch. This mimics the experience of being placed on a team and iterating upon their product. I’m intrigued about this as a pedagogical device, and the sheer novelty means I’ll read this book. It also covers Rx.NET, SignalR, and Playwright E2E tests in the context of Blazor, which is great. But it doesn’t seem like a comprehensive, foundational, and theoretical survey of Blazor, so it will not be first.

C. Sainty, Blazor in Action. Manning, 2022.

This seems to be the comprehensive, ground-up coverage of Blazor I was looking for. I also look forward to its coverage of bUnit, a testing framework specifically for Blazor components. Sainty’s book looks like an amazing way to learn the framework.

P. Bazyluk, Blazor Web Development Cookbook. Packt Publishing, 2024.

The grammar in this preface is painful. Reading the book cover-to-cover is not an option. I might dip into a couple chapters if the topics aren’t covered by any other books. Otherwise, I’ll pass.

T. Wright, Blazor WebAssembly By Example, Second Edition. Packt Publishing, 2023.

This book covers topics that other Blazor books skip. This includes topics that are necessary for Blazor to truly replace front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Ember. Because of this, I’ll definitely read this book. I’m also still not certain whether I’ll want to use Blazor WebAssembly or Blazor Server. Because of that, and because I prefer to learn a wide base of theory before diving into examples by application, this will be a follow-up book for me if I read it.

A. Mozaffar, Mastering Blazor WebAssembly. Packt Publishing, 2023.

The preface says it teaches you to make “cross-platform mobile and desktop apps by utilizing .NET MAUI and Blazor WebAssembly” but there are only two paragraphs and a link to the Microsoft docs. It also says the target audience for the book includes “JS developers who have heard about Blazor and want to discover its superpower and simplicity” but it does not teach C#. Together, these give a slapdash feel to the book. I see no reason to favor it over other options I’ve seen.

M. J. Price, Real-World Web Development with .NET 9. Packt Publishing, 2024.

Even though the book came out last year, the O’Reily Learning Platform still has the early access edition. Google Books has the final front matter, though. This book seems to be to the .NET world what Agile Web Development with Rails 8 is to the Ruby world: a taste of everything you need to develop a web app, motivated by building one from scratch. In this case, though, its coverage is wider (including making APIs, the Umbraco CMS, and containerization) and deeper (including HTTP, Playwright, and dependency injection). Some content “included” in the book is an online link, which I find odd.

M. Delamater and J. Murach, Murach’s ASP.NET Core MVC, 2nd Edition. Murach Books, 2022.

This book is too tightly-focused on MVC, which is not as relevant to my professional needs right now. While it covers topics applicable to all ASP.NET Core applications such as Entity Framework Core and Razor syntax, those will also be covered by other books.

J. Engström, Web Development with Blazor, Third Edition. Packt Publishing, 2024.

This is the first book I’ve seen that carries a comparative analysis between Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly throughout the entire book. This should be incredibly helpful to understand the trade-offs and make an informed decision. It also touches upon topics I haven’t seen from other books: adding Blazor to an existing Angular or React site, Blazor in .NET MAUI, and a comparison between real-time updates in each of Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly. I’m excited to dig in.

P. Himschoot, Full Stack Development with Microsoft Blazor, Fourth Edition. Apress, 2024.

More comprehensive than any other Blazor book, this may obviate the need to read another. Like Engström, the author gives equal billing to Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly throughout the book. Like Wright, he covers a wide base of theory rather than relying only upon application to explain the framework. Like Sainty, he covers the framework from the ground up and has plenty of discussion about bUnit. Like Pine, he covers SignalR for live updates, but also compares it with using gRPC directly or communicating over a RESTful API.