Customer Reviews

Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is by far the best book that I have found on Silverlight PERIOD.
It is beautifully written and illustrated with hundreds of useful examples from which the reader can diverge. It starts off very simply and adds one concept at a time so that the reader can easily follow along. It goes far beyond the animations that I hoped it would do and yet remains clearly comprehensible so that I am quickly able to add my own concepts to any example.

I especially liked the extensive use of C# code behind which permits a much better user interaction.

User interactive animation is, after all, what Silverlight is all about and this book will make it possible for a lot more web authors.

I really can't do the book justice in this small space. So I will just say that I was totally amazed when I first saw it and I become more delighted with it every time I read another example.

As the title suggests, this book deals exclusively with animations in 2D, although Chapter 7 details techniques for 3D simulation.

The book starts off, after an introduction about "What You Need to Know", with a number of examples on basic transforms and moves on to storyboards and animations. Then follows chapters on animation techniques, coordinates in Silverlight and using trigonometry. Towards the end there are two very good chapters on Collisions and Particle Systems.

Every chapter has a set of projects for the reader to complete, together with completed projects.

However, what makes this book outstanding (for me) is in the two chapters on Forward and Inverse Kinematics and Silverlight Virtual Reality Objects. The numerous possibilities for applications in real-world advertisements are immediately obvious and very attractive: from making a chain bracelet or necklace "come alive" to demonstrating how gantry cranes work are but two examples from many possibilities. The VR objects are perfect for all-round views of anything that needs to be seen from various points: cars, garden furniture, anything.

Everything in this book is useful in some way and the total collection of project examples is outstanding. Doubtless, there will be useful books, still to be published, on the other aspects of Silverlight: business applications; layouts; videos, but this book does exactly what the title claims: form a Foundation for Silverlight 3 Animation, and in a way that leaves little for improvement on its examples.

This is an excellent book! I'm a C# developer for mostly business applications, and I was looking to get better at animation and Expression Blend. There are a ton of examples. The examples are non-trivial and fun. There are tips and tricks that I don't think I would have picked up had it not been for this book. The only negative comment I have is sometimes the concepts that make the demos work are not fully explained, like why you need a storyboard and not just a timer to animate object movement. I would highly recommend this book for any C# developer wanting to get a deeper understanding of how to make compelling applications with Silverlight and WPF.

It takes you from the simple built-in Silverlight animation classes and goes deep to vector, trigonometric and kinematics animations. It it not an easy book, sometimes you need to read some chapters a couple of times to really grasp and understand the content, but it is the best book there is out there for animations. It also shows how to build some games with Silverlight. Even though it is a Silverlight 3 book, code is version generic, so it works with Silverlight 4 without changes.

Initially had a problem downloading the code examples from the suggested site in the book and gave my first review of 3 stars total. The author saw my review, contacted me and resolved the download issue which was pretty amazing and gracious of him. Seems the dowload problem had to do with 32 bit versus 64 bit operating systems. I am using Win7 64 bit. The author sent a new link to download the code examples from which I did and they all worked perfectly. Outstanding service, thank you Jeff!

The book itself is well worth the time and investment to anyone interested in Silverlight Animation. Very thorough and well written. Out of the four Silverlight books I own this is one of my favorites. Highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in Silverlight Animation or just Silverlight in general. The author Jeff Paries knows his material and the book is well written. Thanks again for the download help.