Customer Reviews

Silverlight 2 Bible

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

 

 

This book covers a lot of ground. The authors successfully used concise code examples to explain many concepts and show off many of Silverlight 2.0 capabilities. By the time you're done reading through this book, you would have learned not just basic stuff such as how to create, style, customize, and animate different kinds of Silverlight user interface controls, but also how to: build Silverlight-enhanced ASP.Net applications, add metadata to video files and access them programmatically, divide up your application to support fast initial download retrieving additional xaml or content only when needed, fire off background worker threads to keep your application responsive, access remote services via WebClient, HttpWebRequest/Response or plain old TCP sockets, and work with XML and SQL Data Sources via LINQ. The code samples were constructed with Silverlight 2 Beta 1, but I didn't find a download link. Overall, I think this book is very well written and you will learn a lot from it!

Very helpful. Index leads me to where I want to be. Good even for a beginner in WPF and Silverlight 2.

Before picking up this book, I had little idea the power that Silverlight has. I had heard it referred to as "flash killer" but that was about it.

Brad does a great job at presenting the building blocks of Silverlight in a straightforward readable way, that makes sense. I was able to go through the examples without any problem, and by the time I finished the book felt like I had a good grip on the subject matter.

This book was well written, and gave me a better understanding of the subject, what how it works, and what the possibilities are by using Silverlight.

I'm a professional C# developer who has done complete full scale applications in C#. I was looking for a book which had accurate and complete information about Silverlight 2.0. This book is NOT it.

1) This book is not up to date with the actual released version of Silverlight 2.0, but rather the Beta. So some of the examples don't work, or are confusing as a result.

2) I'm working with one of the chapters now on making custom silverlight controls. It is basically written as a step-by-step recipe with zero insight into the WHYS of what you are doing (example DependencyProperties), which is pretty pointless. If I want to find code to just copy without understanding what I'm doing, that is all over the web. I buy a book with nice examples / tutorials so I can learn HOW things work.

Don't waste your money on this.

I agree with the first reviewer of this book in that this is not a bible. The book could have easily added another 500-700 pages of content. The book tries to cover too many topics never going into depth on any of them. You can get the same information on-line. I bought this book hoping there was sufficient content to build a half decent app. Usually that's what you get from the "Bible" series. I should have looked closer at the font size after looking at how many total pages.

It would have been nice to see a few full featured working silverlight sites with the book or at least on-line.

I would love to see the authors create a site to accompany the book that had some nice large size solutions that demo'd the topics.

If you are a professional developer avoid this book for now.

Overall a well-written book with a few errors which would be better titled "Beginning Silverlight 2".

Pros: The author writes well and gives good concise examples. There are some very well placed cross-refs and a few good tips scattered throughout. Though I'm more interested in the code I did enjoy the chapter on Expression Blend, finally someone was able to teach me how to use it.

Cons: I wanted to like it more but there are code errors (most are forgivable), some verbiage annoyances (methods referred to as functions, properties as attributes, inconsistently), way too much focus on the media player in a few chapters, and definitely an intro book and not a bible. Like another reviewer said, there's very little on the "why" and I don't think they even really explain what a DependencyProperty or attached property is before using them. For a beginner book this might be okay but if you're going to start defining ControlTemplate's you should fill in a little back story.

This book it's so afar away of bible, all in the book have in same tutorials in the internet, don't have advanced things.. really I don't recommend...