Customer Reviews

Dynamic Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend: Sketch Your Ideas...And Bring Them to Life!

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

First of all, let me say, I think Sketchflow is amazing. Also, this book makes it clear that you can do very sophisticated things with the Blend UI before you have to slow down and code. Now for the very bad news.

This book held out ambitious promise. It promises to present how to use Sketchflow as a disciplinary backbone as you step through the sketching and prototyping phase of making things, such as software. And, I still believe Sketchflow can do that. But this book is a cut and paste catastrophe. You can literally see how they cut and pasted but did not fix sentences. The absence of the article "a" in very key places, was very distracting. Then in one caption there were additional "a"s. Critical words were left out of sentences, too. Explanations often complicated things that are just simple steps. You're designers! Don't you know when your work gets in the way of affordance? I hate it when tech doc writers think they're writing literature or even non-fiction and don't just number their steps. They're probably scarred they won't look smart if they do that. But smart tech writing is making functional users fast. (Lot's of Microsoft Blend blogs number steps and avoid Dynamic Prototyping's paragraphical convolutions). Luckily, I opened up Sketchflow and did a project before learning how to use it! So, I recognized, eventually, that they were attempting to explain something the UI just made very obvious on first use. STEPS!

I'd imagine I'm the only guy to ever make it to page 325 out of around 500, because there are no negative reviews. I also know a lot of people just read and don't do the hands on exercises.

I could forgive the writing sophomoricities, the worlds' darkest, tiniest screenshots, and stylish paragraphs that obscurred the steps, if the project steps, and the project files were actually correct. But, get this, a majority of the time, you are directed to project filenames that are different than those in the folder for that particular chapter. I reversed engineered. I set up my own files from scratch. I rewrote their sentences until I knew what they were trying to say, and I went into the actual code to fix things. During a chapter on data management, after hours of frustration, I found a blog promising to perform the same tasks. It had 3 times as many steps, because it ran for the code, but it all worked perfectly! Is that how you learn to do projects in expression blend? Random blogs?

This book and I are like a couple in an abuse cycle. I'd finally finish a chapter badly bruised and wondering if "this was it". And then the next chapter's introductory paragraphs would get my hopes up and the honeymoon was back on. An ever-so-brief honeymoon, abruptly ending when I'd try to open the next project file, or would follow the books steps which turned out to be wrong, and again I was fighting back, web-searching, blog reading, re-reading the paragraphs, restarting the files, failing back to older files, reinstalling the files, etc.

My friends keep telling me to give it up, and keep asking me why I can't seem to stop myself. But there are not plenty of fish in the sea. In fact, I've gone through a couple of much better written Blend books and the author's jump off into the code long before the UI requires it. Like, "How to make a button." Why would you want to know how to code a button to learn states, etc? Nobody does that. Blend comes with tons of buttons that can be easily customized. It's because the authors don't know how to use the UI to build cooler things than buttons, presuming that I will know how to take that button coding information and make really cool RIAs, really quickly without using the Blend UI--which is a contradiction in terms. This book at least excels at avoiding code to do what the UI can already do. It just fails to successfully present how they did it! Don't buy it. Find a better way to learn it, and then share it with me!

The last work files in the final chapters, where you're bringing it all together, WON'T EVEN LOAD in Blend 4. I don't know if it's a file compatibility issue, or what. By the time I was loading those, I'd quit reading the chapters becuase previous files were failing. Tragic. I'm puting it in the bookshelf tonight, the margins filled with my notes of frustration. "File didn't have this name. When I loaded the one that IS there, half the execises had already been performed on it", etc.

It's the only book of it's kind, and it doesn't work. So sad.

The well spoken wisened Bill Buxton wrote the preface. Bill, you're brilliant, your influence on how Blend and Sketchflow are built is fantastic. But why didn't you try the book's exercises before you associated yourself with it? You're why I bought it! I love your books, but in the future, please take the time to test technical books before you cost me[...] and 20 hours of frustration. Why is your time so much more important than my time, and the time of all the people who buy this book because of your endorsement?

First, let me begin by saying this book is awesome, it really is a sterling book. Second, let me say this is an example of a sterling book that got slammed by bad execution, many typo's and examples that don't work. I have to still give this book a 4 though because it really taught me everything I needed to know about getting into sketchflow.

There is so much extra knowledge gained from this book outside of just sketchflow that it warrants a spot on my "top books" shelf. The authors trully know the system and you feel like you're getting somewhere. However, I'm a devigner (developer / designer) with 2 decades of hard core coding and designing under my belt which allowed me to overlook all their mistakes. Other reviewers have already mentioned them all so I won't go into details. Also, the last part of the book where you actually design a system using their examples is severly flawed, there are a number of files in the zips that are 0 byte files which is the reason the projects don't load but by this time I was already seasoned in sketchflow and merely read through the text and ignored the examples. The first parts prior to this work just fine however which is really all you need.

Therefore, my closing comment would be, if you're a seasoned developer AND designer you'll be able to make it through this book and will find it invaluable as I haven't found a better book on Blend 3 with Sketchflow 1 (I'm on Blend 4 with Sketchflow 2 though), it just doesn't exist right now. But once better books come out (there's a few coming out within the next two months) you'll hopefully have something better which is why it gets a 4 instead of a 2.

I really wanted to give this book a 5 star rating because it really helped me become comfortable using SketchFlow. But, as other reviewers have mentioned it is sometimes difficult to follow the examples because the steps are unclear, or the resources are difficult to find. The addendum on their website fixes most of these issues but not all. I was still able to figure out all of the examples thanks to the finished projects that you can download from the books website, but the frustration encountered when trying to follow some of the examples is why I grudgingly gave this a 4 rather than a 5.

Also, I used Expression Studio 4 and I was very happy to discover that they provide all of the projects for the book for both version 3 and version 4 of expression studio.

Developer's perspective: I am a developer and have no formal education or experience with design. I got interested in SketchFlow because I needed a good way to prototype my projects and we do not have a designer where I work so the design of my projects also falls to me. The first 3 chapters are geared towards design in general and they talk alot about things that you would probably have learned if you went to a school of design. While I found these chapters to be very boring there was some useful information regarding how to go about designing a solution and the stages that a prototype will go through. Apart from that this book is completely accessible to developers who sometimes get thrust into design and prototyping and need to learn a good tool for that purpose.

If you need a book that focuses on SketchFlow do not be afraid to get this book. Though there are still a few places where the examples are hard to follow you can work through these, and the book does an excellent job of getting you up to speed using SketchFlow.

I like this book. Detailed explanation with pictures and lot's of examples.

P.S. I'm Russian, so it also a very good practise for my English. :-)

Found this book to be a good introduction to SketchFlow. The first fifty pages give the history and reasons for prototyping, so they could be skipped. In fact the authors suggest that sections can be skipped depending of the reader's knowledge.
I would choose another book if you know Blend and have a background in prototyping. I don't, so I found the book useful as an overview to the subject. It's easy to read and get through. The book comes across more of a tutorial than an in-depth discussion of SketchFlow.
If you are new to the subject, then this might be a good book. If you know the subject or want an extensive knowledge on SketchFlow, then you might want to try another book.

I fully agree with the earlier reviewer who wrote that long and carefully worded essay. No need for me to try to improve on those many valid points, so I'll just be brief.

This book was a obvious hurry-up work with no real editing and loaded with outrageous typos. Even the errata had errors in the very first paragraph (addition instead of edition). When I read a technical book it is completely depreciated at the end. Couldn't get a nickel for it on EBay because of all the annotations and commentary and page-folding and paste-ins that I do. I have thus destroyed many, many books in my 30 years of programming but think of what I have learned. Without exaggeration, this one takes the booby prize as the worst I have ever handled.

In spite of that, I forged through it, doing all the exercises and adding my own trial ideas into them as I became more engaged in SketchFlow and Expression Blend. It is currently the only book out there on SketchFlow, but believe me if I had found another I would have tossed this one in the trash.

I was at Microsoft's Boston HQ a couple of nights ago at a DotNet Developers monthly meeting. Incredibly, a copy of this book was offered as a door prize. I promptly stood up and delivered my rant about the lack of quality and my difficulty with it. Don't authors know it's a viral world now and the word is clearly out on this mess. The publisher (Que) should be ashamed.

I carefully proofread the first released chapter of this book. I sent back detailed notes with dozens of errors and suggestions for clarification. I offered to continue. The response from both authors was decidedly lukewarm--in one case, showing very obvious indication that this book wasn't personally important, some new project having captured that position.

The published book contains at least quarter of the issues identified!

This is unfortunate because of the lost opportunity for such an important and underrepresented subject area. Hopefully, another author or team of authors will soon do justice.

If you are looking for a overview of why to prototype this book has a good 50+ pages giving the history and reasons for prototyping. Since I've purchased a book called Dynamic prototyping I think that was 50+ pages wasted since I obviously have already decided to protoype my project. The walk through sample project was good for a beginner but most of what was covered can be learned by watching any of the MS video series on Sketchflow. I found the last 1/3 of the book a total waste. It had nothing to do with prototyping with such chapters as What is .Net, What is XAMAL, What is C#, and what is Silverlight. What does a 60+ pages of a technology overview have to do with prototyping.

I read through most of this book in a night in the same manor that I read most development books, speed read to the important parts. I didn't see any major issues with the grammer but then again I wasn't proof reading their book. There is definetly some copy and past going on as some of the topics covered near the start were later used again with minor changes later int he book. Last not the binding of this book is the worst ever. I've never had a development book fall apart but about 1/3 of the way through the binding gave out and I actually have pages falling out of the book. Keep in mind this is one evening of just speed reading through the book not months of heavy use.

My over all review is stay away from this book unless you are looking to just learn more about the the prototyping process and want a book to walk you through the samples.

I have to agree with the 1 star rating frustrations. Everything they write about is true:

File names that don't match the book, Missing images (sketches), Chapter projects that have been half finished already. Sometimes the steps are detailed and others they are very vague or missing. Spelling and grammar errors abound. I have wasted hours trying to figure something out because the book doesn't match the projects. The sketches are .png files which I am assuming have alpha channels because if you edit the image in MS Paint a save it, you loose the transparency info.

I am more than half way through the book and have had no problems with Expresion Blend 4 converting the files from Blend 3. Though one of the other reviewers pointed out that in the later projects they just won't convert. That would not surprise me.

UPDATE 9/30/10: Well I am into chapter 24 and though the projects still convert without problem, they won't build in Blend 4! The book is based on Silverlight 3 and the authors provide a .dll that is not compatible with Silverlight 4 AND, they do NOT provide the source code for that .dll! To get things to work you must dig into the XAML and delete the trigger that uses that .dll. But this is not the authors fault as the book is for Blend 3.

Also, it looks like the authors or the publisher have abandoned the web site as there have been no updates nor is there an errata anywhere. It would be nice to go to the web site and see a list of corrections or be able to download the missing files. But if you download what is on the web site, you still get all of these problems. Considering how long this book has been out, that is inexcusable.

With that said, if these problems where not an issue I would give the book a 5 star rating. With the exception of "Part I - The Theory Behind Sketching and Dynamic Prototyping" (boriiiing!), I like the way the book flows. A quick prototype introduces you to some basic SketchFlow capabilities. That is followed by more detailed and advanced capabilities all the time progressing through different stages of the Dynamic Prototyping process on through to the finished product. If you stick to it you will learn how to use SketchFlow from project concept to sketching and prototyping. In fact, this book demonstrates the power of SketchFlow very well and it is they joy of working with SketchFlow that saved this book from a 2 star rating and a lonely life on the shelf.

UPDATE 10/1/10: After struggling with the projects through chapter 23, I discovered that the books synchronization with the chapters source and projects just completely falls apart. A quick example: throughout the book a component screen used for navigation uses large customized rectangles. Suddenly, in ch. 27, the book shows them as Radio Buttons. Nowhere does the book discuss the change over to radio buttons. Furthermore, the ch. 27 project is missing more files than any other chapter. In fact, some of the missing files don't exist anywhere and are not recreatable so the solution will not build at all (in previous chapters, I was able to find most missing files in other chapters or recreate missing screens in Photoshop Elements).

I could go into more and more detail about all of the problems but I'll sum them up this way. All developers have experienced the scenario where you "get-latest" from your source code control system only to discover that someone has circumvented source code control and stepped over a ton of changes you had checked in: screwed up code, missing files, trashed project and solutions, etc. I feel that is what happened with this book. Two authors (or most likely an editor) merged all the chapters together and really screwed everything up. The sad part is it is very obvious that nobody ever sat down with the book and actually tried to work through the chapters with SketchFlow before the book went to press.

If you plan on working through the book, be prepared for some serious frustrations.
If you are only going to read it, then it has a lot of great information about SketchFlow.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, it is the only SketchFlow book in the sea.

I am recommending this book with the understanding that you will need to work around the previously mentioned problems.

Pros:
I think this is an excellent book, it walks you through step by step in how to use SketchFlow and create a Prototype. It saved me many hours of guessing.It gives you a very good explanation of the tools you need to succeed. I also appreciate that they first show you how to use the basic functionality to create a full working prototype, and they present a different section for those interested in every detail.

Cons:
Even though the book uses Expression Blend 3 to illustrate the examples, and the current version available for trial and sale in Microsoft website is version 4 the changes are minimal, and you can follow all the examples. Another thing that does not match with the book is the location of the files you can download form the author's website to follow on the exercises. This is a very simple thing to correct, and I do wish the authors would take the time to fix this on their website.