Customer Reviews

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight(TM) 1.0 (Pro Developer)

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

 

 

This review refers to the beta 2 version of the book. This book is exactly what the title says - it is a good, solid introduction to programming Silverlight 2 beta 2 in C#.

Laurence does a good job of covering all of the basics of writing Silverlight applications - his web site has a good table of contents (http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/) which clearly describes the books contents.

One of the features of the book that I especially like is the valuable information about how to run Silverlight from a Linux system and also information about using Silverlight with PHP, Java, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, Ruby, and IronPython.

Laurence has been very responsive in helping to resolve any issue with the code that I have had. The book's code is Silverlight 2 beta 2; however, there has been one minor upgrade and I am sure that there will be more so having good response from the author is very important when dealing with beta software.

I do highly recommend this book as a basic introduction to writing Silverlight 2 beta 2 code in C#.

David Roh

Laurence Moroney's book is a wonderful introduction to Silverlight 2, and he produced this when folks need it, just when Silverlight 2 is new. He did this by hard work, and by knowing the product inside and out (and he's providing continuing support through release and beyond.)

The book is extremely well written and well organzied, with solid coverage of all the core topics and a good bit beyond (including extensive coverage of Deep Zoom, interacting with ASP.NET and using Dynamic Languages such as Ruby)

Moroney is one of the most knowledgable writers about Silverlight, and his style is straight forward and to the point. This book is everything you might want in an introduction to programming Silverilght 2, and I would not hesitate in recommending it.

Jesse Liberty
Senior Program Manager - Microsoft
Developer Community Liasion

This book has a great introduction of Silverlight 1.0, and had a nice flow of documentation that made the book a fun read. The book covered the silverlight platform well, and illustrated a few examples of how Silverlight can work in conjunction with a few other technologies like Asp.net and PHP.

The book had very good code samples to illustrate specific points of Silverlight 1.0 technology, and additionally included a good primer on the upcoming Silverlight 1.1. Overall I think this book is a great resource to get up and running on Silverlight in a short period of time.

When first learning Silverlight 2, I picked up this book and got up to speed very quickly. It was a great introduction with lots of building block examples. I like practical books with lots of examples, so this book was great.

This book is "ok", but honestly it's just not what someone new to Silverlight needs to see (especially if they are not strong in C#). To illustrate, look at the opening section on making the block sliding game.

There are a lot of assumptions about how comfortable the reader is with OO C#, to the extent that some parts of the example aren't labeled with a "This goes here" instruction, so if you don't know you can get frustrated.

Even myself, knowing a little bit about C# OO development got hung up waiting for more precise instructions.

Another peave I'm having, are the variable names in he code. Have we come so far to have variable names like this?

Canvas[] cI = new Canvas[16];
Image[] i = new Image[16];
int[] board = new int[16];

and

<snip>
int nx = 0;
for (int ix = 0; ix < 4; ix++)
for (int iy = 0; iy < 4; iy++)
{
nx = (ix * 4) + iy;
i[nx] = new Image();
</snip>

Come on guys, this is a learning book. How about this:

Canvas[] canvasArray = new Canvas[16];
Image[] imageArray = new Image[16];
int[] board = new int[16];

and

<snip>
int imageIndex = 0;
for (int ix = 0; ix < 4; ix++)
for (int iy = 0; iy < 4; iy++)
{
imageIndex = (ix * 4) + iy;
imageArray[imageIndex] = new Image();
</snip>

I know it's verbose, but as someone new to Silverlight, I find myself irritated at wasting time trying to keep track of cryptic variable names when they could easily have more descriptive names.

Sure, if this were a high performance web app you may need to keep sizes down, but this is a learning book.

There's a lot of good info in here no doubt, but I still think I'll be looking elsewhere for my "beginner"s" experience.

A final thought is the long winded framework description in the beginning. It's another typical MS documentation trait that just bores the reader to tears with things he or she may have little context with which to consider it. It should be high level, clear, short and sweet, and then move on to simple "hand's on" instruction. The long winded framework conversation should come at the end, after the reader knows what it all means.

So, just my two cents. I've only used and never written technical manuals so no doubt the author is more skilled than I. Please don't take my criticism as disrespect. Just trying to let folks know how it looks from someone who likes easy to use training manuals.

Thanks

This is a good book to start on Silverlight. It's a little shallow on network access and data binding but overall it does a great job of explaining Silverlight 2 fundamentals. Highly recommended if you are new to Silverlight 2.

Laurence has done an amazing job on this book. "Introducing Silverlight 2" is the perfect followup to his previous book, which illustrated the concepts of Silverlight 1.0. The book goes into great details with the various features of Silverlight 2. I highly recommend it as a training resource and development reference for all Silverlight users.

I do recommend Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed as the best Silverlight reference so far. However, Introducting Silverlight does have a couple things that I haven't seen in other books:

- A whole chapter--albeit a very short one--is devoted to Silverlight ink support. It has a useful sample to pull together concepts from the SDK.

- The author also showed a little of his developer evangelist motivations by including a quick look at integrating Silverlight into non-Microsoft platforms: Java (JSP) and PHP with MySQL. The example was basic, but it did add a welcome extra dimension to the book--and quite interesting to see the ease/portability of Silverlight.

This book probably won't be your end-all reference for Silverlight 1.0 (I do prefer the free SDK over this title), but it does make a for a good read-it-and-resell-it book.

Well written book. Laurence gives great advice along with examples. I'm a nooby at Silverlight and this definitively helps.

If your looking for the examples in VB, forget it. At one time the author said he was going to do the VB translations. Never happened to my knowledge. To top that off, I MISSED MY RETURN DATE.