Customer Reviews

Microsoft Expression Blend Bible

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

 

 

I've been using Blend/Design and WPF for awhile and I've been relying on Adam Nathan's "Window's Presentation Foundation" book for a reference. Nathan's book is very good, but is lacking advice for using Blend (which isn't surprising since his book was released in Dec 06 and Blend wasn't commercially available until May 07). I was looking to fill the gap with this book.

The "Microsoft Expression Blend Bible" is the first of a slew of Blend books that are coming. I bought it the day it was available on Amazon and have read through it. Frankly I'm a bit disappointed. I guess I shouldn't be, usually the first book to market is a bit rushed. There is good stuff in the book, but the first 3 chapters are just filler and have little information related to Blend. The rest of the book is a very shallow tour of a large number of features supported by Blend.

I would say that this book is better than nothing (which is your alternative right now). But I suspect books that are coming out late this summer and in the fall will replace this book in my library. The bottom line is if you need to get started now, get this book and Adam Nathan's book. If you can wait, then check out then reviews of Blend related books in the fall. I'm sure something better will come along.

Lots of filler information to make this book big. Very little information on how to accomplish things in Blend.

This is a good book to learn Blend. It presents lots of material on how to use Blend to create user interfaces that make heavy use of graphics, animation, 3D, and video, and it presents principles of user interface design, too. The book is easy to read and easy to use.
It could have gone into more depth on coding details, so the title "Bible" may be a misnomer.
The chapters of the book that contain code seem pretty basic, so this book is probably better for someone who wants to use the graphics features of Blend (which are very extensive) rather than do programming. The book's Web site www.blendtips.com is useful, too.

This is a terrible book, obviously rushed to print that is all over the map. It tries (and fails) to be a book on user interface, WPF, Expression Blend, elementary C# programming, and most bizarrely how to tell a story (to give an example of how they filled this book they spend one page summarizing Aristole's De Poetica). The examples of using Blend itself are so convoluted and poorly explained that I couldn't figure out how to do half of them, and since Blend is a relatively radical change from standard Microsoft Designer and Programmer UI's walking through the steps more clearly would have been the minimum one would have expected. All the screenshots included are so small (and full screen) so you can't even make out what they are talking about. As I am not a graphics designer, this may have some appeal to that crowd (though I can't imagine why), this is not the book to use to learn Expression Blend from a programmers perspective. The code in here is also TERRIBLE (for example they create XML by creating XML strings one at a time and then appending that to a file?? If you are going to create XML with a string at least use the StringBuilder class but really this should have been done with XMLWriter or at worst the XmlDocument.) Avoid this book at all costs.

I'm disappointed in this book. I was looking for a good introductory text with tutorials on how to use Blend. I couldn't follow the tutorials in the first few chapters of the book--not because they were too technical, but because they were poorly written. I'm guessing the tutorials weren't tested with real users before publication. The reference material is only so-so, and it duplicates a lot of what can be found in other sources on the web. I'm afraid I couldn't recommend this book as a learning or reference resource for Blend.

I had very high hopes for this book, considering its title. I think a more appropriate title would have been something like "Designing Next Generation User Interfaces". The book only breifly discusses Microsoft Blend. Instead, it speaks more about designing rich user interfaces in general. I expected a feature-by-feature explanation and maybe some sample programs, but was sorely disappointed.

If you want to know how to use Blend, I would not recommend this book. If you want to know all about the theory behind designing rich UIs, then perhaps this book will be useful. It does talk you through a few things in Blend, but uses illustrations and screenshots very sparingly.

As a non User Interface or Design expert, this book was very helpful for me. I was looking for a book which give me a introduction to design aspects related to Microsoft Expression Blend, and this book have a lot of useful information. However, I expect more content/stuff in specific subjects, but 700 pages are very limited for a complex subject as WPF and a new tool as Microsoft Expression Blend.
If you are a developer, you have WPF skills, and you want to take a very first approach to Microsoft Expression Blend, this book will help you.

This book is way to wordy and does not get to the nuts and bolts about Blend. I had to struggle to read through each chapter. I would wait for a another Blend book...hopefully people start writing them soon.

I saw some of the mediocre reviews on this book and nearly didn't buy it. But I'm most glad I did.

The writing is clear, the examples are well chosen, and I appreciated the authors' including material on what makes a good UI and how to use Blend to produce one. Some reviewers called that padding, and I suppose if one is a UI expert, they could be. But to me, they were interesting and suggested ways that I can employ the Blend techniques that the book is teaching me.

I agree with one of the other reviewers that the book is lite (actually quite lite) on coding. Because I come from a coding and not UI background that was OK with me.

The only real problem I see with this book is its title. A true Blend Bible would be 10,000 pages long. I'd say this book is more like a mid-depth, practical, well-written introduction to the major graphical features of a product with a huge feature set.

It's a book I'll keep, too. Lots to come back for reference.

The Bible series of books do not claim to teach you how to learn to use software, they teach you how to overcome issues with software you already know how to use (to some degree) and they generally do a pretty fair job at that. The Bonus is that this book is not claiming to teach you to learn the software from the ground up, it teaches you to use the software better. Its a solutions book and says as much. Buy it this way and you'll be happy.