Microsoft Silverlight Books

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Great Javascript Book. Not for n00bs though.

01 September, 2010

Great book.

The material is relevant and concise. Perfect guide for someone who has programmed in other languages but wants to get into Javascript.


Not for n00bs though. N00bs, you've been warned.

RYAN M LABOUVE

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Head First C#

Great book for first time object oriented programmers

01 September, 2010

I have been out of coding for almost 10 years and decided to get back into it recently. Since I'm focusing on .Net technologies I thought jumping into C# would be the right step. I read most of the reviews for this book and the gist I got was: it was good for beginners, well written, but full of errors.

I have found only two of those to be true: The second edition of this book seems to be mostly error free. I'm about half way through and I *think* I've found only one error so far (this was very minor too). All of my code has compiled and I haven't had any issues at all. The book is very beginner oriented but moves at a good pace. The concepts come fast and things like class diagramming and coding styles are seamlessly worked in to the lessons.

The book teaches C# and object oriented programming from the beginning and I can't recommend it enough for someone who is starting out or has been out of the game for too long (like me). Make sure you get the second edition and you wont be disappointed.

evannever

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Pro VB 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform

One of the best VB.NET books I've read

01 September, 2010

As someone with over a decade of experience in VBVBAVBS I was looking for a good text that would be help me port my brain --and the code I support --to VB.NET. This is the best reference book I have come across.

If you are looking for a book that will get you up and going from the git go with the GUI functionality of VB.NET, your patience will be sorely tried. The author spends 26 chapters introducing and explaining VB.NET concepts with console based examples and exercises. But as I wanted to be able to build console applications which was never directly possible in VB, the author's m.o. was greatly appreciated. I preferred to learn the basics first without the distraction of the GUI. Your preference and mileage may differ.

Ars Gratia Artis

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Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Fourth Edition

Great Book on .Net 3.5

01 September, 2010

This book is very well written. Covers almost all features.
Chapters about Linq, WCF & WF gives good introduction to
these features.Helped me very well for our software upgrade.


sweet pisces

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Beginning ASP.NET 4.0 in C# 2010

Best ASP.NET book I have ever read!!

31 August, 2010

Finally, a beginning ASP.NET programming book that definitely and orderly takes you from being a beginner to a programmer. Too many books out in the market place start off very basic and get very complex too soon. This book builds on itself, using the information you used in the previous chapter to aid in the understanding in the next chapter. I never felt like I had to go back and research a topic or look to other sources to understand the chapter I was reading. The author immediately started teaching about objects, value types, data types, and namespaces which gives the reader an object-oriented viewpoint from the beginning. The author is clearly a realist, quoting from Dan Appleman who once described inheritance as "the coolest feature you'll almost never use", and doesn't waste your time focusing on items that you probably will never use. His real world examples aid in comprehension and makes learning actually enjoyable. I am glad the author chose to include advanced topics such as XML, ADO.NET, cashing, state management, Ajax, and LINQ as these technologies are used by every ASP.NET developer on a daily basis. I recommend this book to anyone who has never programmed before as well as for the seasoned developer who needs to learn ASP.NET.

Aaron Grant

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Pro Silverlight 3 in C#

WELL DONE

29 August, 2010

well done , and waiting for the new version(SL4). A good solid foundation before Diving into SL4(silverlight).

eric njoroge

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Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4

Awesome Book for most Silverlight 4 Developers

27 August, 2010

Anderson's book is simply the best Silverlight 4 book for readers developing LOB/intranet and business web apps. It is well written and readable without being too verbose. It focuses on doing business/database web apps, which is what the vast majority of software architects and developers do. There is only one other published book Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook - also a very good one - that has a similar focus, but I think this one is a much better book, covering WCF RIA services in quite a deep and comprehensive manner. I think you may want to get both books, if you can. Coverage of topics such as printing, security, exception handling, localisation is also very good. It has little coverage on topics less relevant for most busines software (such as graphics and animation, business intelligence) which makes good sense to me as it stays faithful to its title and leaves these topics to other Silverlight books such as the soon-to-be-published Pro Silverlight 4 in C# and Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software. By trying to cover all topics in one book these other books tend to cover less fully and lucidly the key topics required by most developers.

Certain business app oriented topics I was a bit disappointed to find virtually missing include multi-threading and lower level network programming (e.g. socket programming, multicast, publish/subscribe) required for low-latency, high throughput application scenarios prevalent in the financial world where silverlight is becomming increasingly popular. The other, similar book Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook covers some of these topics, but imhop inadequately. In spite of that I still think this is a 5-star book, and I see it becoming as popular as Matthew MacDonald's Silverlight 2 & 3 books.

Mr. Bookish, Mild and Meek

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Entity Framework Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Good book on EF 4.0

25 August, 2010

I have learned a lot from this book and used some methods in the book for my application, so I am a grateful reader. Since this book has been praised by so many reviews, I thought it would be most useful for me to state the strengths of this book quickly then follow it with my reservations that prevented me from giving 5 stars to it.

It is very readable and well organized. It is more than a collection of recipes because the first few chapters could give a beginner a good start on EF. Some people may think it has a lot of redundancy by providing a complete list of the code for each recipe, I personally like the completeness (I have the eBook version so the thickness does not bother me at all).

Here are my reservations:

1. There are three methods to query a conceptual model in EF - LINQ to Entities, Entity SQL, Query builder methods. This could be confusing to novice readers. The book mixes all of them and it may be the best approach to mix them to achieve the most elegant code, but I wish the author could share the rationale of each mixture which can be very educational.

2. Each recipe is a method to solve a problem with a specific approach but it may not be the best overall method. I wish the book could clearly point out this. A typical example is recipe 4-3 which is a method for signing a value to a property with code during data saving. This is a very common scenario for data entry applications (e.g. setting the user ID value which is not entered by the user for each record) and it is usually achieved by a single line of code in an event handler of a control. In the case of the recipe, it can be handled by one statement in the ItermInserting handler of the DetailsView, but the recipe uses a pure EF way of creating a partial method to intercept SavingChanges event.

3. I think the best way to achieve a solid data model is to have a solid database design and the EF conceptual model should just be a reflection of that. EF has matured a lot but the latest version EF 4.0 still has some glitches or undesirable behaviors. It is quite possible that someone may have to recreate the model from the database and it may happen many times. If a lot of "custom" modifications are made to EF model, all of them have to be repeated and this may require a lot of work, good documentation or memory. The book has a lot recipes doing exact this and some of them even get into the XML code editing. I wish the book could clearly point out the caveats of doing this.

H. Zhang

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JavaScript: The Missing Manual

Also introduces the jQuery JavaScript framework

24 August, 2010

This book not only introduces JavaScript (its prime focus), but it also introduces the popular open-source JavaScript framework, jQuery, which supports many free open-source plug-ins found on scripting archives. With jQuery plug-ins, you can code at higher levels through the use of reusable code. The jQuery framework also takes care of many incompatibilities across browsers (like for JavaScript event handling) so the user can focus on his own JavaScript applications.

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