Customer Reviews

Beginning Silverlight 3

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Good book, best I've read on Silverlight (also the only one so far). I got this book because I wanted to create a web application that interacted with a database. Although not covered in depth, it was just enough to get me started (chapters 5 and 6, specifically). Chapter 8, Local Storage in Silverlight, was my favorite. I like the prospect of creating rich internet applications with the ability to access isolated storage.

Contrary to the product description a basic familiarity with web development and simple C# coding is critical, and by all means a requirement to get the most out of this book.
The chapter on deployment (chapter 13) was a little weak.

Beginning Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair is truly a "Beginner" book on Silverlight and is where I am right now. Silverlight may be an intimidating and complex subject to a beginner. This book is a great way to start learning Silverlight and overcome any anxiety you may have in regard to learning it. You will easily learn Silverlight with this book. Silverlight has come a long ways since its first version (1.0), which was very basic and had only two controls available, the Rectangle and the TextBlock. It may be advisable that you have some basic C# knowledge. Make sure you set up your examples in a folder, like "\Beginning Silverlight 3\Ch3\", etc. You may want to refer to these examples later.

If you are a Silverlight, or XAML, beginner, you should implement the examples step by step, chapter by chapter, in order to truly benefit from this book. I found that there were some things not covered in the book which I had to learn on my own, such as the fact that in order to use the Silverlight 3.0 tools, I had to uninstall Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 first, and then install Silverlight 3. The book starts off extremely simple, with an introduction to Visual Studio 2008 in Chapter 2 and then proceeds on to layout controls in Chapter 3, where you learn how to create layout panels, i.e., Grids, WrapPanels, StackPanels, DockPanels, and other types of layout tools in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is where the meat of the book starts, with the use of Silverlight user input controls, i.e., TextBox, RadioButton, CheckBox, etc. The book also instructs you on how to use extended controls, by adding" xmlns" declarations at the beginning of, for example, the page called MainPage.XAML.

Robert Lair is careful in that he literally walks the user step by step through the Silverlight development process. For example, he makes sure that you know how to add "using statements" at the top of the code-behind pages, in this case, the .cs pages, for namespace referencing. This is common C# knowledge, but Robert is making sure that the new Silverlight developer is also getting all of the basics to be successful.

Chapter 5 covers Data Binding and Silverlight List Controls. Data Access and Networking is covered in Chapter 6; this is an important chapter. For example, this quote on page 137 from the book: "The most common mechanism to access data from a Silverlight application is through web services, typically a WCF service." Silverlight applications can access data using ADO.NET Data Services, direct server connecting via TCP sockets, and out-of-the-box support for JSON, as well as RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication feed formats. Chapter 9 covers the use of Expression Blend, if you'd like to work with your XAML visually.

There is a lot more to this book, which I have not covered in this review. I highly recommend this book for the Silverlight Beginner.

Beginning Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair, learn to build Silverlight applications quickly and easily. Robert is a published author of many books and magazine articles. Technologies in which Robert specializes include: Silverlight, mainframe modernization to .NET, ASP.NET custom application development. This book is for beginners only it will take through step-by-step walk-through tutorials and some hands on training. I really did not know how to use expression blend and that is used throughout this book. If you are a flash person you will go through this book easily. My favorite chapter is five because I have been looking so long for an explanation on data binding using Silverlight controls, well this chapter explains it all to me and there are hands on training on it. Another good chapter is six that goes through data access and networking, I am a fulltime developer and that is the kind of stuff I look for. Over all it is a great book.

Beginning Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair

Yes, we are all aware that Silverlight 4 has been out for a few months now, but a good book deserves a proper review anyway, right? That's what Apress' Beginning Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair has ended up being for me--a good book. Not over-the-top good or outstanding, but good.

I have the benefit of reviewing this book as a beginner, unlike so many others who already possess a background in programming and web design. My experience is limited to a few courses taken in college that, well, just don't really cut it in the real programming world as I'm coming to find out.

Mr. Lair presents Silverlight 3 in a form that is fit for a beginner indeed. His examples are fairly straight forward with explanations of concepts that are frequently accompanied by diagrams that further enhance the text. What slightly prohibits this book's accessibility to a beginner with absolutely no background in programming is that he makes assumptions as to what the reader's knowledge base is. A glaring example is the "Try It Out: JavaScript IntelliSense and Debugging" section in chapter two. He gives you a debugging example and after which has you hit F5 to run it. Well, I did that...multiple times. My default browser would open, but no "Hello World" example. After about 10 minutes of fiddling, I remembered from a class that you have to build your solution. Little steps like that may seem trivial to some, but obviously important to true beginners like myself.

I would still recommend this book for beginners despite the few quirks. Chapters 5 and 9 covering data binding and Expression Blend, respectively, were exceptional chapters that clarified many questions in this reviewer's mind. Just be sure to have a friend with some Visual Studio experience on hand to help you with those annoying little quirks that keep you from completing examples.