Customer Reviews

Pro Silverlight 3 in C# (Expert's Voice in Silverlight)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is by far the best resource for Silverlight 3.0. In this version the author added a whopping 185 pages to the last edition. He added chapters on Data Controls, separated the Styles, Templates, and Custom Controls into two separate chapters name Styles and Behaviors, and Templates and Custom Controls, and added a new chapter on Navigation.

I have bought 3 other books on Silverlight 3, and put together they only contain about 1/8 of the value of this book (you can see which ones they are by Googling "Shiny Turds Books that do not Cut the Mustard").

It starts out with an introduction that covers the Visual Studio Silverlight environment. He then gives a short introduction to XAML. The introductions really help those who have no experience get rolling right away.

The author covers every out of the box element in detail (including the DataGrid control and a little on the DataForm control), and includes a nice reference for where the element can be found in the book. He also covers styles and templates, brushes and transforms, shapes and geometries, animation, and layout containers.

The book covers out-of-browser applications, assembly caching, networking, multithreading, isolated storage, browser integration, media and deep zoom, wcf services, the application model, and dependency properties and routed events.

One of the things I like best about the book is it includes a lot of references and material on the Silverlight Toolkit.

The book is very readable for those that like to read cover to cover, but it also makes a great reference.

The downloadable code is very usable and very complete.

This is a must have book for any developer working with Silverlight 3.0.

First the good news - the PDF version of this book and source code are available now from the APRESS web site.

I have had this book on order for so long that Amazon actually cancelled my first order.

The PDF (and I am sure the print version) is in full color.

The book is an updated version of MacDonald's Silverlight 2 book - from the PDF it appears to have the same print quality which is superb.

If you want to learn Silverlight 3, this is the book to own - period.

David Roh

This is an excellent book, but with a couple of qualifications. First, it's not a tutorial-oriented book. If you're brand new to Silverlight and learn well by doing guided walk-throughs, you might want to start elsewhere. I started out with some online tutorials and another book (Silverlight 2 Unleashed). I found the content here really helped round out my knowledge of Silverlight. MacDonald does go a lot deeper than the other sources I've used.

Second, don't expect coverage of Expression Blend for designing applications - there's almost no coverage here. Creating complex animations and styles can be much easier in Blend, so you'd want to get that coverage elsewhere. It certainly helps to understand how things like layout and animations work under the hood, and the book gives a good grounding there.

It's very easy to say that " I loved reading this book and worth my time and money". The book is very easy to read. All the chapters are arranged systematically, that way it's easy for readers at every level. It starts with explaining the history of Silverlight and slowly introduces all the basic concepts necessary to develop Silverlight applications.

I loved that the author has a "What's New" sections wherever applicable, that way for people like me who is upgrading their skills from Silverlight 2 can jump to those areas if they are only interested in the new features of Silverlight. As far as the depth, the author has done a very good job of explaining all the important concepts and almost all the controls available out of the box and controls available in Silverlight Toolkit.

What I liked is that the author also mentions the limitations if any or cautions and because I have implemented multiple projects in Silverlight, I can tell that all those tips , cautions and Notes can save you lot of time and frustration. For example, the mouse wheel event only fires in IE and not in other browsers or how to handle exceptions at an application level and how VS handles them when you are in debug mode vs. release mode. Those types of tips are very useful when implementing a feature and when you put the app in productions.


All the new features like Out of Browser, Navigation are discussed. Individual chapters are dedicated to Animation and Sound, Video and Deep Zoom to go deep in these areas which was very useful for me personally.

.NET Ria Services is slightly touched, not in depth as its relatively new which can be slightly disappointing for those who want to learn about it .Data Annotations and Data Validation for the forms and other Data Controls are discussed in depth

I wished the author has talked a little bit more about Rest Services as the web Client has some limitations in areas of REST, Frameworks like Prism and Caliburn and Commonly used design patterns like MVVM and other TDD best practices in context of Silverlight

For that reason, I would say that this book is more suitable for entry level to mid level Silverlight developers. But if you are completely new to Silverlight or just touched few areas in developing Silverlight, I seriously recommend this book to get strong in all core areas of developing Silverlight applications.

Matthew MacDonald's Pro Silverlight 3 in C# should be regarded as the "go-to" book on Silverlight 3. This book has it all, and is approachable by all audiences, seasoned developer and beginner alike. From an introduction to XAML, Microsoft's new standard UI language, to a fine-grained, in-depth discussion of animation in Silverlight, MacDonald gives you everything you need to create functional, real-world applications in this emerging and rapidly developing platform.

The most notable and impressive aspects of this book is its applicability to very diverse audiences. Regardless of where you are coming form, this book will guide you to the point where you can create compelling and useful applications.

If you are coming from a WPF background, you will be most interested in which of the WPF features you are accustomed to using you will have to abandon to conform to Silverlight's more restrictive feature set. Fortunately, this book does a good job of pointing out those differences, and explaining how one goes about working around these deficits.

If you are new to Silverlight, Pro Silverlight 3 will deliver a wide and deep base of knowledge to start building your Silverlight 3 applications on. The first several chapters on XAML, Layout, Dependency Properties and Routed Events and Elements introduce the reader to the building blocks of Silverlight applications. A reader experienced in Silverlight 2 or WPF development could probably skip these chapters, noting only the properly distinguished notes on the differences between full WPF and Silverlight.

Throughout the book, MacDonald does an excellent job of noting the differences between Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3. In terms of the total content of the book, these differences are relatively small, yet the power and freedom in your apps that is afforded by the new features they cover is tremendous. Readers coming from an in-depth knowledge of Silverlight 2 (or those who read his previous book) will find the differences clearly noted at the beginning of each chapter - making it easy to find just the bits you are looking for.

So no matter where you are coming from, Matthew MacDonald's Pro Silverlight 3 in C# will help you develop or grow your Silverlight skill set. This is a must-have book for developing rich internet applications on the .NET framework. I highly recommend it.

This book was a little late but not too late for my needs.
Since my project started a view weeks before I've got another Silverlight 3 (Essentials) book to bridge the gap.
Big mistake. It took me 1 hour to pick up the few interesting points inside.
Lessons learned: the more paean of praise on the cover the less content to expect.

This book is exactly what you need as a business developer:
browser integration, web services, multithreading, data controls (including the DataGrid), a really great explanation of data validation and binding, isolated storage,
resources, styles, behaviours, templates, out of browser, how to split your app into separate files to improve download speed und much much more. Some weeks earlier and I would have saved dozens of hours collecting answers using the Google way.

Btw: if you are an SL/XAML rookie this book is well suited for you too. I didn't mention all the other 'basic' chapters (XAML, layout, multimedia, events etc.)
Rip them out and voila: here is your "Starting with Silverlight" book.

In the introduction the author says:
"This book has the ambitious goal of being the best tutorial and reference for programming Silverlight".
At the time of this writing: yes, it is with a clear margin.

This is a great book for anyone wanting to get into Silverlight development. The book covers a wide array of Silverlight topics at a fairly low level providing the reader with a solid all round knowledge of the technology. Matthew MacDonald's writing style is also clear and easy to follow.

I'd like to give this book 5 stars but the editing, formatting of this book is a little sloppy. Not that that really matters to much, but it does detract from an otherwise excellent read.

I am a developer, but fairly new to .NET, and brand-spanking new to Silverlight, so I was coming at this with brand new eyes. This book does a great job of introducing Silverlight, starting with simple examples, and building on those examples while introducing new concepts. Matthew MacDonald has a very pleasant writing style, and he clearly knows his stuff. What I particularly liked were the explanations of some of the quirks of the language or environment; Whenever I found myself thinking "Why do they do it like that?" there was a sidenote that would essentially say "You may be wondering why they did it like that..." Prescient, and clearly shows empathy for the reading experience.

Beware this is a long book, and there's more information than necessary if you just want to get up and running right away. But if you want a deep understanding of the Silverlight development experience, I think you'll find what you're looking for here.

[Full Disclosure: I signed up and was accepted to receive an e-copy of this book for review]

If you want to developer in Silverlight, this is your book. It has a simple language and shows, using many examples, how to create a Silverlight application.
The author cover many aspects about how to developer using Silverlight, for example: Silverlight Tools, XAML, controls, data manipulation, layouts, events, transformations, animations, styles, data binding, templates, Multithreading, Networking and much more.
All content has many examples that show how to apply the techniques shown by the author. Out of browser application also are covered by author, using many examples and show many possibilities about this tecnique.
This book is very excelent for beginners and advanced users too, because it has all the content is very well divided into chapters, thus you can find any information quickly.
All source codes can be downloaded and they are very usefull.
This book is very enjoyable to read, why have many examples and has a very clear language.

I purchased Matthew MacDonald's previous book (Silverlight 2) and was also very happy with that. I looked at a few other Silverlight 3 books (I even purchased Essential Silverlight 3 whilst I was waiting for this book to be published) but this book is seriously the one to get for both beginning and experienced Silverlight developers. It has comprehensive coverage of the things that developers need to know in order to implement and deploy a professional Silverlight application. I doubt whether you will see a bad review for this book; it was worth the wait.
As a side note, I have purchased numerous books by Apress and I commend them on their selection of authors.