Customer Reviews

Professional WPF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows Presentation Foundation (Wrox Professional Guides)

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

 

 

I am a developer who spends most of his time in the user interface hooking up controls to data sources. I have worked with .NET Forms for a good deal of my career. My primary interest in learning WPF is to see how to achieve what I do in Forms using WPF. If Wrox intended this book to be specifically oriented toward designers they should have named it accordingly. Someone like myself who could care less about how pretty a form looks and more about functionality is not going to find this information useful.

What I want to know is: how to create common controls like a data grid view? how do I do data binding? localization? element interaction? minimal styling? While some of these things are touched on, the depth is limited. True professionals want details, not skimmings. I am not proud to have this book on my shelf.

Outside of the lack of detail and information, there are regular grammatical errors that should have been caught by a competent reviewer. Obviously, the amount of care put into the production of this book was small. I have had good luck with Wrox in the past, but this book fails the test.

I'm only here reading these reviews now because of my own bad experience, and find that others have similar views.

Wrox USUALLY has great books, to the point that I didn't even bother reading reviews - I just saw they had a book on Professional WPF and I bought it sight unseen. This book has ruined that trust for me and Wrox.

Another reviewer said: "Anybody wanting to understand WPF technology needs to first understand the WPF learning curve is very steep and requires a good OOP background to grasp the fundamentals". I completely agree - and this book is not it. Yes, WPF is a very difficult topic, and one that needs detailed descriptions and examples on how to do things in a new way. It touches on Blend (albeit 2 versions old as of now), and has some general points of what to to... but never enough to apply the knowledge to anything else. It's like a general help file that tells you not much more than the obvious. I find myself searching for actual examples after reading the book.

Because this technology is moving so rapidly (4 releases of Silverlight (basically WPF lite) alone in 3 years is a tough target to write a book on. Things are constantly changing. And maybe (in the books defense) that is the major problem here. But the bottom line is I bought and read the book, and don't even feel like I need to keep it around since there are not really good examples and reference to gleam from.

Most Wrox books I've bought have hit the mark on the subject I wanted to learn. Unfortunately this is not one of those books. I find myself digging through MSDN and online examples way, way too much to compensate for what isn't in this book (or covered enough).

I mean... I got the gist of what's going on with WPF, but I felt starved for serious details. Because it was a starting point for things I later discovered from other sources I give it a 3. But there's just too many tap-and-leave subjects in the book for me to get a serious grasp on what it is I want to do with my software. I don't think I'm alone.

I find it rewarding that I am the first reviewer for this book. I say this because Wiley/WROX and their authors are decent people whom do not self promote by writing their own reviews.

This book is as good as any I have read on WPF technology. The authors have done a wonderful job in presenting a very difficult subject. Above all the technical material submitted in this book is intellectually sound and thus informative.

Anybody wanting to understand WPF technology needs to first understand the WPF learning curve is very steep and requires a good OOP background to grasp the fundamentals. It also helps to understand the declarative nature XAML and how UI development is greatly enhanced by building .Net assemblies with a declarative interface.

I started this book once, and had to put it down. The information was a bit overwhelming at first, and I didn't have a copy of Expression Blend or Expression Designer. I was using Expression Blend beta, Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net Framework 3.0 SDK. Many of the examples didn't work without significant and time-consuming research. Then I purchased a copy of Expression Studio and started over. The examples worked perfectly. Not only that, but the examples in the last several chapters were quite good. I think this book deserves a five star rating because it provides a good introduction to WPF.