Customer Reviews

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed

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

 

 

I bought this book after Silverlight 1.0 from Wrox, and from a brief topic-by-topic comparison, Silverlight Unleashed is simply better.

The Wrox book was a very good introduction, but it did not offer much beyond that. Silverlight Unleashed has more useful code samples (and they are also in full color, like the Wrox counterpart), and what I found most helpful was the series of "Tip" sections along the way to shed light on Silverlight's "gottchas". They gave good hints on what will probably be defined as Silverlight best practices in the future.

Topic-wise, the most notable difference between the two books was chapter eight on downloading content. Silverlight Unleashed had much more helpful explanations.

The Wrox book did, however, have a better introduction to Silverlight from a theoretical point of view. If you deal with Silverlight in a non-developer role (account/sales manager, business analyst, etc.), go with the Wrox book. That seemed to more plainly explain its features, integration with other platforms/tool sets, and how to sell others on Silverlight.

But if you are in a developer role, this book will be more immediately useful.

As a person who has read all the official documentation cover to cover and other Silverlight books cover to cover I can say that this is the best book on the subject.

Even though I had already read over 500 pages on the subject I was still able to find over a hundred things that I had not encountered anywhere else. One example is animation. He explains how you can set animated "to" in Javascript and you don't need a "from". A animation problem that previously had me stuck for a week was solved with 10 lines of code.

The examples are small and easy to follow. The coding is first rate. The "side bars" all contain priceless information. There is no fluff, if he wrote it down it's important. He also has all the code from the book online (http://www.adamnathan.net/silverlight/code/) where you can alter the examples in your web browser and see the results.

I also read his Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) (Unleashed) and that is the best book on that subject so it is not surprising that he was able to nail this one perfectly.

This book was very usefull and masterfully crafted. The book guides you from creating the silverlight plug in, to using XAML, to making the most out of the Silverlight's media capabilities. The topics are covered to a very low level, but the author provides such carefull explaniations that even I finally get how attached properties work in XAML and why we need them. The sidebars and breakouts are extremely usefull. There are explanations, were appropriate, of how Silverlight compares with Avalon. Adam even points out known issues and problems along the way. The code samples are extremely relevant to the topic and very usefull. Truly, an enjoyable book for learning Silverlight!

This is a good book for an introduction to silverlight, but the argument are not treated so deeply. This book contains an overview of the silverlight engine with a good amount of basic example, it is a good book for everyone that does not know anything about silverlight and want to read the first book on the argument

I bought this hoping to learn SL. It only contains information on 1.0 which is very buggy. Granted that the author points out all these issues, but after reading the first few chapters it became apparent that even SL 1.1 is probably significantly improved. I didn't think it was worth the time to learn all the tricks to get around 1.0 issues. The author even states that when 1.0 was released, 1.1 was already in beta. I returned and decided to wait until SL 2.0, which should be in April 2008 or so.

This book is really good. It's an easy, fast read that explains XAML for silverlight very well.

Because it teaches the xaml itself and not the tools used to create it (such as expression blend) it's more aimed at developers.

The book goes into the small details of adding a silverlight xaml to a web page and other small xaml and javascript interaction details. It covers a lot of the small tricks developers are looking for.

most programming books I've seen were always comlicating things to make the author sound smart, this book does the opposite by keeping things simple and easy to understand even when dealing with more complex subjects.

Great book to get you started on silverlight. Once I got past Part 1, the book does a great job showing examples on how to use the silverlight elements.