Microsoft Silverlight Books

jQuery Cookbook

Great Content

26 February, 2010

With some books you can quickly locate the detail you require from the index, retrieve, adapt and use in your own scenario and then put it back on the shelf for a later date. This book, although you can do that, I would suggest you read it in it's entirety so that you don't miss some of the hidden away gems that will aid you in your future jQuery development. A great foundation builder for both jQuery and the less known UI library, I highly recommend it for beginner to intermediate programmers.

Mathew Garland

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The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques

Encyclopedic, authoratative, maybe a little a little too dated.

24 February, 2010

"The Essential Guide to User Interface Design" is a huge, massive book that delves very quickly into the dirty details of UI and GUI design. The author, Galitz, has been in the trenches since the earliest computers that actually did interface to humans (predating the PC). He is indisputably an expert and authoritative source for what works, and doesn't, when it comes to UI/GUI design.

The first of two substantial criticisms I have of this book is ironically one of its (and the author's) strengths - it is authoritative because Galitz has been at the forefront of UI research since the beginning, but he puts too much of that historical information into this book. As historical context it has some value, but too much of it leaves one with the feeling that the book is somewhat dated. Editing out the excess detail about text-based CRT displays might leave it feeling more current (the current GUI information is there, but is diluted too much by the historic information).

My second criticism is that the book could also use substantial editing to reduce its bulk, without eliminating any valuable information (of which there is a great deal); there is a lot of redundancy. Some is fine for reinforcing the author's points, but this book has too much - I have frequently read through a bulleted list of design points (presented first), only to then read exactly the same information in a slightly expanded form over many more pages. This is specifically true in what might be considered the heart of this book - the fourth chapter of Part 2; Step 3: Principles of Good Interface and Screen Design. It covers in detail part three of the author's fourteen-step procedure for UI design. This chapter alone is about 180 pages long! With tighter editing it (and the book) could probably be shrunk by 1/3 without any loss of information.

That said, even though this may not be the most concise source of (application and web) UI design guidelines, it makes up for that in breadth and depth, and the credibility and authority of its author.


Scott Adams

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JavaScript: The Missing Manual

jQuery: The Missing Manual

22 February, 2010

Lots of good material. Lots of practical examples. But be forewarned about a few things regarding this book.

First, it is by no means a comprehensive, from the ground up manual on Javascript. Lots of things are left unreferenced. This is not terribly surprising, since one volume can hardly cover it all. But if you're brand new to Javascript, you will still have plenty to learn after reading this book.

Second, readers should be aware that some of the examples given are terrible violations of usability standards. A good example is the frequent use of the alert command to show a popup window with a message. I understand that the goal was to keep examples short and sweet, but beginners should be told that popups are one of the best-known ways to annoy visitors and chase them away from your site. An example also shows how to make "sticky" tooltips with rollovers but doesn't bother to mention that users hate this sort of thing.

Third, as others have noted, most of this book is actually a tutorial on using jQuery more than Javascript. You can't use jQuery without Javascript, so it's not entirely fair to say that this is a book on jQuery in disguise. And besides, jQuery is now so popular, so powerful, and so well-known, that it appears that it will probably be incorporated into Javascript one day as an official part of the language, or that Javascript will be heavily adapted to look and act like jQuery.

But if you're committed to not using jQuery, however--for example, if you need to work with another, similar Javascript library--then this might not be the best book for you.

A quibble on style. The author touts on the back cover that a strength of this series is that it is written by "real authors." Yet this author uses the meaningless phrase "in other words" on nearly every page; frequently several times per page. This book may have been written by a real author but it was not edited by a real editor. Mr. McFarland, banish forever from your writing the words "in other words."

Reader

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Programming ASP.NET AJAX: Build rich, Web 2.0-style UI with ASP.NET AJAX

great starter book on the subject

19 February, 2010

using this book and the Programming ASP.NET, Third Edition by Jesse Liberty
I was able to immediately begin developing an ASP.NET 2.0 website in C#
using the very practical examples and explanations

Joseph A. Skarulis

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SQL Queries for Mere Mortals(R): A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL

The title says it all

19 February, 2010

This is well written and goes at a slow pace for beginners. Since I'm more than a novice, I had to skip through most of the first part of the book. Once the author got into more meatier subjects like cross joins, unions and subqueries I appreciated the book more. Well done.

Craig G

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed

Good overwview of Visual Studio 2008

18 February, 2010

I've found this book to be very well done. While others have said that its not very detailed, the level of details was perfect for what I was looking for. I liked the overview of WPF and the example on chapter 16 was a very good introduction to WPF. It gave me a good understanding of the basics and I now feel more confident to delve deeper. I've also looked at the section on Team System and found it to be perfect for what I was looking for.

The reason for the 4 stars instead of 5 is that there were a number of errors in the source code. I've only looked at the source code in chapter 16, but there were a number of errors there. For example, they declare a variable "private string _path", but later on in the source code they refer to it as "path" (without the underscore). Ok, that is something I could figure out.

In the buttonBlur_Click event they call a function BlurBitmapEffect, but they don't implement this function! Another issue I had, and this might be just because I'm new to WPF, but I followed the examples starting with the first one on Chapter 16. Well, when I got to the ImageViewer example, all of a sudden the namespace changed, and it wasn't mentioned. So I kept getting errors like InitializeComponent not found. It turns out that if you change the namespace you need to also changed it in the binobjdebugWindow1.g.cs file (make sure you have show all files set). Not sure if this is something the authors should have mentioned, but wouldn't it be logical for someone to follow examples from start to finish without creating new solutions/projects for each one?

I've only listed three such issues, but there were a number of small issues like this. I finally just downloaded the source code from their website and everything there seemed to work. The website is -[...] and then click on the downloads page. If the above link doesn't work you can get to it via [...]and then click on the "More Information" link.





tedunni

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Learning C# 3.0

Top Notch Service

18 February, 2010



I had a wonderful experience with this retailer. He rushed my order to me when I explained that I needed these books for a test and had been unable to get them for several weeks. I emailed to ask him if he could please put them in the mail as soon as possible because there was no two-day air option. I had my book in two days. Doing business with him was a pleasure that exemplified top-notch customer service.

Y. Johnson

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Pro Silverlight 3 in C#

The best Silverlight book I have ever purchased

17 February, 2010

Not only does this book explain XAML and the silverlight controls in details, this is the only siverlight book that gives some insight on how the silverlight framework process dependency and attached properties. Unlike the other authors of silverlight books I bought, Mr. MacDonald takes the time to explain each Silverlight control in depth. Every chapter is filled with useful information and provides exactly what I need to make me want to continue reading some more. After reading this book, I am more confident on how to develop applications using silverlight.

David Taylor

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Beginning C# 2008 Databases: From Novice to Professional

Excellent Leap Into Serious Enterprise Apps

17 February, 2010

I purchased a copy of this book in order to get on the Microsoft Visual Studio platform especially the C# technology. Coming from a Java background I needed something that takes you into serious territory quicker. And this book has not failed. It addresses a serious technology is a friendly manner - crisp and clear. The instructions are clear and lead the reader into the core of database programming without assistance. If you are new to the Visual Studio platform, then splashing a fortune on this book is a good investment to make. I have recommended itBeginning C# 2008 Databases: From Novice to Professional to my students and I hope it works for you too!

Carl Hope Korkpoe

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Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

great book- I couldn't have done my project without it- but one omission, and one implementation that doesn't work

17 February, 2010

I was under the gun and had to deliver a fully functioning site in two weeks in asp.net. I had some experience with C# console apps, but not so much with asp.net. However, I found the MVC concept very appealing, having used that methodology in other web solutions (php, grails, etc.)

I found this book invaluable for my project. The examples were clear and worked its way through exactly the type of site I needed to build. There was a bit of a disconnect between the database domain classes and customizing them. At some point I found that I could explore my database tables in Visual Studio 2008 and drag over tables to create these .dbml files, which built my domain classes for me. But, then I didn't understand how to build up the domain classes with more model-specific functions. This whole scenario was not addressed in the book. I think it's a bit of an oversight, as I have to assume a LOT of people will want to build their domain classes this super-easy drag, drop, compile way. Furthermore, I didn't know how to search for answers because I didn't know what I was doing was called- linq to sql, linq to entities, or linq to objects.

(BTW, I found the solution to that was to create new "partial" classes to which I could add methods and properties that would augment the normal ones.) Also, you'll have to remove and re-drag over the tables, if the underlying table structures change. And, if you want to tie your app to a view, instead of a table, but you want your domain classes to be the name of the table, instead of the name of the view, you can just drag over the table and then right-click and change the properties to make it's source be something like "dbo.content_vw" or whatever your view name is. Also, if you don't know [...] was equally invaluable.

My final criticism of the book has to do with his implementation of the CAPTCHA. I can't see how it works at all. Perhaps there's some conflict between the form validation methods he demonstrated earlier in that chapter, but the code generates the captcha the first time, but then if you fail to enter the correct value, it throws the error and reloads the page, displaying the error message. However, this re-loading of the page generates a new CAPTCHA, which is fine. It should. But when you enter that new value, the code still tries to validate it against the first generated value. I don't know why this is, but even his sample code didn't work. I submitted errata to the Apress site for this book, but after weeks, there was no response and the errata was not added to the list of other ones. I eventually implemented reCaptcha, but since it's not a home-grown solution, it's not as customizable and I find the images hard to read. I would much rather get Sanderson's CAPTCHA working, but I have a deadline....

But that criticism aside, I still think this book is great, and that's why I gave it 4 stars.

Scott Roberson

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Next Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 3

Great book on BI with Silverlight

16 February, 2010

I recently finished reading Next Generation Business Intelligence Software with Silverlight 3. I loved it. I work for ProModel Corporation which specializes in modeling and simulation of business processes. I was shocked that such a specific book about BI in Silverlight is already written.

I found the content of the book very relevant to the software I create. ProModel bread and butter has been its simulation engine(s), but over the last several years, we have more heavily focused on UX and we have invested heavily in Silverlight so we could leverage our existing IP. Bart's book has inspired us to add more value in certain areas of application by surfacing some key information the user would like to see.

I enjoyed the BI 1.0 versus BI 2.0 discussion. I feel the author has years of experience worth sharing in terms of surfacing key information to users. I appreciate his willingness to share this knowledge.

I am incorporating several ideas presented in the book in the next release of several products we create such as Sparklines, multi-threading to improve performance and collective intelligence. The book is not heavy in code, but just enough to kick start you. I have leveraged the book code samples to facilitate conversations within the development team.

Thanks,
Dan

D. Hickman