Microsoft Silverlight Books

This should be your first Silverlight book...

When first learning Silverlight 2, I picked up this book and got up to speed very quickly. It was a great introduction with lots of building block examples. I like practical books with lots of examples, so this book was great.

Steven Fox
28 February, 2009

It's ok, but it's not for beginners.

This book is "ok", but honestly it's just not what someone new to Silverlight needs to see (especially if they are not strong in C#). To illustrate, look at the opening section on making the block sliding game.

There are a lot of assumptions about how comfortable the reader is with OO C#, to the extent that some parts of the example aren't labeled with a "This goes here" instruction, so if you don't know you can get frustrated.

Even myself, knowing a little bit about C# OO development got hung up waiting for more precise instructions.

Another peave I'm having, are the variable names in he code. Have we come so far to have variable names like this?

Canvas[] cI = new Canvas[16];
Image[] i = new Image[16];
int[] board = new int[16];

and


int nx = 0;
for (int ix = 0; ix

Come on guys, this is a learning book. How about this:

Canvas[] canvasArray = new Canvas[16];
Image[] imageArray = new Image[16];
int[] board = new int[16];

and


int imageIndex = 0;
for (int ix = 0; ix

I know it's verbose, but as someone new to Silverlight, I find myself irritated at wasting time trying to keep track of cryptic variable names when they could easily have more descriptive names.

Sure, if this were a high performance web app you may need to keep sizes down, but this is a learning book.

There's a lot of good info in here no doubt, but I still think I'll be looking elsewhere for my "beginner"s" experience.

A final thought is the long winded framework description in the beginning. It's another typical MS documentation trait that just bores the reader to tears with things he or she may have little context with which to consider it. It should be high level, clear, short and sweet, and then move on to simple "hand's on" instruction. The long winded framework conversation should come at the end, after the reader knows what it all means.

So, just my two cents. I've only used and never written technical manuals so no doubt the author is more skilled than I. Please don't take my criticism as disrespect. Just trying to let folks know how it looks from someone who likes easy to use training manuals.

Thanks


IT Guy
14 February, 2009

Good Silverlight Introduction

This is a good book to start on Silverlight. It's a little shallow on network access and data binding but overall it does a great job of explaining Silverlight 2 fundamentals. Highly recommended if you are new to Silverlight 2.

Talha Shah
28 October, 2008

The only resource you need for Silverlight 2

Laurence has done an amazing job on this book. "Introducing Silverlight 2" is the perfect followup to his previous book, which illustrated the concepts of Silverlight 1.0. The book goes into great details with the various features of Silverlight 2. I highly recommend it as a training resource and development reference for all Silverlight users.

Umesh Patel
25 September, 2008

Brillilant Introduction

Laurence Moroney's book is a wonderful introduction to Silverlight 2, and he produced this when folks need it, just when Silverlight 2 is new. He did this by hard work, and by knowing the product inside and out (and he's providing continuing support through release and beyond.)

The book is extremely well written and well organzied, with solid coverage of all the core topics and a good bit beyond (including extensive coverage of Deep Zoom, interacting with ASP.NET and using Dynamic Languages such as Ruby)

Moroney is one of the most knowledgable writers about Silverlight, and his style is straight forward and to the point. This book is everything you might want in an introduction to programming Silverilght 2, and I would not hesitate in recommending it.

Jesse Liberty
Senior Program Manager - Microsoft
Developer Community Liasion


Jesse Liberty
24 September, 2008