Microsoft Silverlight Books

Good reference, uneven coverage

Some chapters like "Threads" are well written, others like "Generics" are not. I found myself loving and hating this book depending on the chapter. That said, this book does offer more depth and scope than most books making it a "must have" reference book.

I tend to read topics in other books first before covering the same material in this book. Doing it the other way, i.e., using this book as a primer", just does not work unless you are very determined.

Anyway, stick to Wrox and you can't go wrong.

Gregory L. Firth
21 November, 2009

Comprehensive

This book is very comprehensive and covers a lot of topics. As the title says, it is for professional programmers. As a beginner, I supplement this book with other beginner books. In my opinion, one of the strong points of this book is that the authors compare language features with C++ and Visual Basic. I have more exposure to C++ and the comparison helps in the learning process.

N. Yu
12 July, 2009

Eric Weinberger's review is exactly correct

I 100% agree with Weinberger's review.

I read through chapters 2-10 of this book, and although there were many good explanations of things, some explanations were lacking and left me frustrated. For example, the description of event handling didn't make any sense to me, even after I read it several times. After reading O'Reilly's Nutshell book on event handling, however, I had a clear understanding of the subject.

Also, Weinberger is right when he states that certain important details seem to be missing. For example, when reading the section on enumerations, I didn't see any description of how enumeration members get default-initialized.

After reading Chapters 2-10, I'm giving up on this book. I like it enough that I'll keep it on my bookshelf as a reference, but, at the same time, I'm not super-thrilled with the quality of this one.


Joel Davis
28 June, 2009

A Fantastice Learning Source or Reference

I'm a developer of average skill, and I have some fairly significant holes in my CS education, so that makes my professional life sometimes interesting and challenging. This book helps me fill in the holes as far as C# specifically is concerned and it helps me with other broader and more general CS topics as well, so that's a big bonus to me.

This book has helped me to understand how to code for certain circumstances, and more importantly, why to use a particular approach for a given problem. It's like a very well taught level-300 CS course in portable form. It's a great language and framework reference, too. It's much more readable than many books on the same topic, so I get a lot from it.

It is a hefty book, but it's a hefty subject. If you want something smaller or more concise, that's fine, but you won't get the excellent detail that's in this book.

I highly recommend this book.

[disclaimer] Wrox generously supports my local user group with giveaway books. I bought this one, however.

Ted Glick
21 June, 2009

If you could only buy one C# book...this is an excellent choice

Ambitous is the first word that struck me as I stood in the bookstore and browsed through the table of contents and flipped through the chapters of this heavy tome.

Delighted is the next word that comes to mind - as I sat in my study at home and began the process of consuming the information and working through the examples.

This is a concise (hard to believe I'm using that word for a text that clocks in at 1730 pages of material)...and comprehensive coverage of C# for Visual Studio 2008.

I am very pleased with the addition of this book to my library.

Kelvin D. Meeks
18 May, 2009