Customer Reviews

Microsoft Expression Blend Unleashed

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

 

 

I have eagerly awaited this book since I first learned of it last fall, when I found Brennon William's XCoders training site. Based on the quality of his Blend traning videos, and the obvious passion he has for Blend, I had great expectations for this book.

I hoped the book would provide a well-organized and comprehensive training program for a complex piece of software. By and large the book does do so, but overall I am disappointed with the presentation and organization. The book has clearly been rushed to production, lacking not only editorial guidance but basic copyediting. The tone is strangely giddy and the examples seem poorly thought out and disorganized. For example, the Twitter example application in Chapter 2 has you create a Twitter account so you can databind to the RRS feed, and see how to connect a WPF application to the feed. The problems I found here were 1) Twitter has apparently changed since the book's writing, as I couldn't find a way to get my own RRS feed, and more importantly 2) there's no point in creating your own feed, as your sample app can only read the public feed. I imagine a typical designer reading the book, strugging to understand what's going on, hardly getting any benefit from this distraction.

As I progress through the book, it's clear that Brennon does tie together important concepts, and provides a solid introduction to a very new and unfamiliar UI creation process. I only wish that more time was spent in polishing the book so it really shone, and that the material was organized using more effective teaching techniques (summaries, bullet points, reviews, etc), with specific callouts for designers (who are no doubt already baffled by the expectation that they need to become almost-programmers) and developers.

More importantly, if users are to embrace the Blend/Design/Visual Studio design paradigm, Microsoft needs to provide real training and educational resources. Having to rely on experimentation, blogs and the sub-par application help to learn a very complex set of behaviors, interactions and concepts is inefficient in the extreme. People such as myself need to learn these things quickly and effectively to be profitable. There are shelves of well-done books for Adobe products. The fact that there aren't comparable resources for the Expression tools, and that the tools are clearly still works in progress, makes it hard to take them seriously. I mean, how much money did Microsoft make last quarter? Why can't it devote some resources to Brennon and the Blend team to take a couple months and write a really fantastic book?

I want nothing better to give this book a glowing review, especially based on the amount of work that went into it. The content is there, but you will need to go over it several times, especially if you're a designer. If you're a designer, I'd suggest the lynda.com Blend training videos first, and then read this book to really get into the power that Blend offers.

This book is for Expression Blend 2. Expression Blend 4 has already been released and they differ so far apart that there is really no value anymore. Microsoft is very commited to Expression Studio and as such they're releasing a new version every year at the moment and the versions have so much new functionality and differ so far apart that you can't get any value out of it.

A brief overview book like "Introducing Microsoft Expression Studio" is a much better buy. At least it contains relevant information. Not sure why there is no newer unleashed book for 3.

Contains no information on Sketchflow or 3D (the book only knows about 2D as that's what was available in Blend 2).

Expression Blend 4 Unleashed is available for preorder and if you haven't gotten into Expression Blend 4 yet I would advise getting that book when it's released. It's by the same author and hopefully this time he fixed the font, it's horrendous :)

That said, all in all I like his writing style and he clearly has a good understanding of things. I for one will most likely add Expression Blend 4 to my bookshelf as I'm sure I'll still be able to learn a thing or two by the time it releases. Just wish he'd put a rough cut on Safari so we can get at it already!

If you're new to XAML/WPF and especially if you're new to Expression Blend, I would recommend getting this book to start you off. It is light on code explanations, since there are other books that are specifically designed to teach you XAML and WPF. So if you're looking for something to teach you how to write it yourself, then I'd suggest another book.

I've had Blend on my PC for some time now but always felt like I was only scratching the surface of its capabilities--and I was right. After working with this book, I've discovered just how easy it is to design user controls and entire interfaces using the tools Blend has. Things that confused me in the past are now pretty clear. Blend has so many embedded and somewhat hidden controls that it's easy to pass over things that end up being really useful.

I have one small gripe with this book: I wish it were in color. WPF is all about creating visually stunning UIs and UIEs yet this book only shows everything in gray scale, which can make it hard when you're trying to decide if what you created looks just like what he has in the book. But it's no deal breaker, since he has his exact color codes printed in the book along with each example.

Overall I'd recommend this book as a good starting point for using Blend. It greatly reduces the amount of time you'd spend trying to figure it out yourself, or trying to code XAML from scratch.

I bought the 'other' expression blend book on the market and while I found it worthwhile, it didn't do what I wanted it to - teach me much about blend.

You won't have that problem with this book.

The book is strong in just about every respect and is reminiscent of Adam Nathan's superb WPF book. There are several examples in it all of which are useful. In fact, the master project so to speak, is very much a 'real world' application that covers topics that are typical of most real-world requirements. YOu can see how they handled it and copy the techniques, or you can use them and just experiment (which is what I did) to fully start to understand how things work.

It's very easy to read and has excellent examples. All in all, it's not just excellent b/c it's the only resource on BLend (although it is), it's excellent b/c the authors covered most useful scenarios and explain themselves very well. They really had the reader in mind in this one and it shows.

I've tried a few times to read this book, but, the writing style coupled with samples that simply didn't work resulted in me leaving this book on the shelf.

The book can be improved quite a bit if the immature, unprofessional writing style is changed for future editions. To be fair, it is the style through out the book rather than concepts that makes this book a poor read.
Most places, while emphasizing concepts, the author gets into an annoying cutesy talk mode. Here's an example: "...It all came together for me a few days later (well at about
three in the morning actually) during one of those rare moments of absolute clarity..."
(page 18, Chapter 1).
As a reader, I am not really interested in unrelated personal anecdotes or wondering why the author was up at 3 A.M. There are more examples such as these that dilute the value of technical content. I hope the proof-reader will expunge such verbiage from future editions so that I don't have a 600-page book with fluff in it.
I'm a bit disappointed with the book due to poor writing more than the lack of technical content.