Not exactly a bible, but still worth every penny paid
This book covers a lot of ground. The authors successfully used concise code examples to explain many concepts and show off many of Silverlight 2.0 capabilities. By the time you're done reading through this book, you would have learned not just basic stuff such as how to create, style, customize, and animate different kinds of Silverlight user interface controls, but also how to: build Silverlight-enhanced ASP.Net applications, add metadata to video files and access them programmatically, divide up your application to support fast initial download retrieving additional xaml or content only when needed, fire off background worker threads to keep your application responsive, access remote services via WebClient, HttpWebRequest/Response or plain old TCP sockets, and work with XML and SQL Data Sources via LINQ. The code samples were constructed with Silverlight 2 Beta 1, but I didn't find a download link. Overall, I think this book is very well written and you will learn a lot from it!
Techie Evan05 October, 2008
Too broad, not enough depth...not for professionals
I agree with the first reviewer of this book in that this is not a bible. The book could have easily added another 500-700 pages of content. The book tries to cover too many topics never going into depth on any of them. You can get the same information on-line. I bought this book hoping there was sufficient content to build a half decent app. Usually that's what you get from the "Bible" series. I should have looked closer at the font size after looking at how many total pages.
It would have been nice to see a few full featured working silverlight sites with the book or at least on-line.
I would love to see the authors create a site to accompany the book that had some nice large size solutions that demo'd the topics.
If you are a professional developer avoid this book for now.
Justin S. Stuparitz31 October, 2008
Not a very good book...
I'm a professional C# developer who has done complete full scale applications in C#. I was looking for a book which had accurate and complete information about Silverlight 2.0. This book is NOT it.
1) This book is not up to date with the actual released version of Silverlight 2.0, but rather the Beta. So some of the examples don't work, or are confusing as a result.
2) I'm working with one of the chapters now on making custom silverlight controls. It is basically written as a step-by-step recipe with zero insight into the WHYS of what you are doing (example DependencyProperties), which is pretty pointless. If I want to find code to just copy without understanding what I'm doing, that is all over the web. I buy a book with nice examples / tutorials so I can learn HOW things work.
Don't waste your money on this.
Joe Keane13 November, 2008