Microsoft Silverlight Books

Very superficial for my taste

This book was a dissapointment for me, i expected something special, but it shows you how to draw and do some stuff with the UI, but it touches superficially the animations, WCF services (only way to get to a database) is not there. How to create converters, or your own custom controls, isolated storage, deep zoom, the new navigation all of that is missing and more.

The PRO Silverlight 3 with C# is much more complete and all around book.

Alexis Rios
22 October, 2009

Worth reading

The book is a great guide to most of the essentials of Silverlight 3.0. I say most because it misses a few key pieces of the puzzle. There is no coverage of services, no coverage of the navigation framework, and very little coverage of the Silverlight Toolkit.

Those points made, the topics covered are covered very well in the context of the essentials. The book is very well written. It is organized in a very logical and clean format.

Most of the essentials books I have read are overly complex, this one is overly simplified, and that makes it a great beginner's text. Just be aware of the missing pieces of the puzzles.

The biggest ding was the "Technical Insight", "Debugging Tip", and "Performance Tip". I'd say one third of them where just observations that you would have to be blind to miss, one third were hints or clues that you have to research further or come to the table with prior knowledge to figure out, and one third were valuable.

I could find no code download, which would have been nice to have for the graphics chapter.

This book had an army of very well know people give it praise. That was the main reason for my purchase. I will ignore praise like this from now on, because most of it was bull.

All in all, the book is excellently written and organized, and the content covered is great. I do recommend buying it, because the dings I mention above of more of a personal preference and may not apply to everyone. The content is definitely worth reading.


T. Anderson
19 October, 2009

Not the essentials of SL *3*

This book was a big disappointment.
Microsoft built a lot of new stuff into SL3 targeting business applications.
SL is an interesting alternative for building B2C and B2B apps beginning with release 3.
After watching a lot of the tutorial videos on the SL homepage I expected to get material that at least touches most of the new features.
That's not the case.
Are you looking for information regarding the new Datagrid & Dataform control, Pagers, AutoCompleteBox, ChildWindows, how how to interact with data services (SOAP, WCF, binary encoding), cross domain policies, out of browser clients, merge external style templates, interaction with DOM/Javascript, interaction with Blend 3 etc? You won't find it here.
This book is mainly about drawing stuff that was already there in SL1 & SL2: lines, circles, brushes, animations, videos, layout, effects etc.
It doesn't even scratch the surface of what the SL3/toolkit bundle adds on top.


Thomas S.
19 October, 2009

Definitely 5 stars

I did not keep knowledge of Silverlight up to date after Silverlight 2.0, so when I had do a project where there was potential to use Silverlight, I headed to the bookstore. I scanned through the available SIlverlight 3 books and this book came across as most promising. Things that immediately caught my attention: Scott Guthrie's foreword and under the hood sections.

From my perspective, the good things about the book are:

1. It is easy to read. My style of reading is to quickly read entire books in the first pass to grasp the key points quickly and I found that this book is perfectly suited for my style.

2. The coverage is excellent. It covers all aspects of SIlverlight at the appropriate depth. I never found the book chatty.

3. Under the hood sections are extremely valuable. For instance, you will learn about the frame rate in silverlight and how you can use that to debug the bottlenecks in your application.

Rama K. Vavilala
18 October, 2009

Required reading for Silverlight 3.0 Developers

I am a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft (so I am continually educating developers in new technologies). This books is a 'must read' for .NET Silverlight 3.0 Developers. It not only contains the 'what', 'why' and 'how' of SL 3 development, but also, critically the 'under the hood' sections dive deep into the 'why we made it this way' and 'how you can/should best use' the features we've implemented.

The author is on the product team and has a strong graphics development background. This background shows in the detailed, yet clear explainations throughout the book.

Lynn Langit
08 October, 2009

Succinct and insightful

I really like the directness of the text--gets right to the point and has great organisation. I've been reading about Silverlight 3 for a few weeks now and "Essential Silverlight 3" is really helping pull the various things I've read together into a clearer picture. The organisation of the book is simple and works well for me as a developer. I'm still reading through the text but so for I really like it--good substance without a bunch of gas. Some of the example don't quite work, but I was still able to grasp the content.

Evan S. Christensen
07 October, 2009