Customer Reviews

Silverlight 3 Jumpstart

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

 

 

Maybe you've heard of this Silverlight thing. There've been 2,300 new Microsoft technologies introduced this year but Silverlight seems like it might be important. You are a busy, experienced business application developer with limited time. You demand substance but there's no way you're going to wade through 800 pages of how to build custom flashy controls. You won't tolerate marketecture; you don't want the "Silverlight Programmers Bible" either.

You should snag a copy of "Silverlight 3 Jumpstart" by Microsoft MVP and Regional Director David Yack. At a slim 209 pages you can blaze through it on a roundtrip flight to Redmond just like I did. You won't learn Silverlight in depth. But you will get a soup-to-nuts view of what building a business application in Silverlight is really like.

Let me be clear about my rating. It is 5 stars because this book does EXACTLY what it sets out to do and does that well. It is not the only Silverlight book you'll ever need. You may not want it at all; if you're going deep dive directly, you might prefer something else. But if you want to discover Silverlight in a weekend, this hits the mark.

All of the essential development mechanics are there.

- How Silverlight compares to alternative client technologies (ASP, WinForms, WPF, Flash/Flex/Air)

- Development tools - got Visual Studio? not much more is absolutely required

- "Hello, Silverlight" - of course

- Hosting a Silverlight app - pretty easy stuff

- Basic screen layout with XAML and visual controls

- Data binding controls to data - because that's our bread and butter

- Debugging - about time someone talked about that

- Making it look decent with styling - think CSS

- SketchFlow intro - executable sketches to win your client's confidence

- Plumbing (aka, Application Architecture) - so you don't reinvent every wheel

David is steadfast and clear about his purpose: to give you a firm grasp of what is involved in Silverlight development.

He shoves to the side everything that would get in the way. You already know it gets more complicated than "that" ... whatever "that" happens to be. "Rough road ahead" signs are sufficient for the nonce; no need for the bumpy ride right now.

When it comes to getting data into and out of your application, I'm personally thrilled to report that David devotes pages [181 - 184] to our "DevForce Silverlight" product; full disclosure: I helped him with those four pages. Nearby you can read about the other "Business Application Frameworks": CSLA, RIA Services, and roll-your-own.

Do yourself a huge favor: don't roll-your-own; I hope you see why when you look at all the challenging ground these "frameworks" cover.

The very nature of this book requires that it be early to market. It's not going to be a "timeless classic" nor is that its intention. This is one of the first ... if not the first ... Silverlight 3 books out there.

The haste shows. There are grammar and spelling mistakes. Chapter 10 was clearly intended to be Chapter 1 as it makes forward references to chapters that you've already read. That's mildly disappointing. Don't let this undermine your faith in the material; the book is accurate in all important respects relevant to your purpose: to learn what Silverlight development is like and whether it might be for you.

The book is affordably priced and an excellent value ... as long as you know why you are buying it. If your time is worth money and you're trying to get out of the blocks it will definitely save you many times the cost.

Silverlight is a tremendous business application delivery vehicle and a heck of a lot more productive than any other web technology out there. Silverlight Jumpstart will show you why.

I'm a developer and one of Microsoft's biggest fans! That's because of the unmatched quality of their development tools and their absolutely unmatched support for developers. But, the frantic pace of releasing new operating systems, server products, and development tools, particularly over the last two years, is a huge challenge for us developers to digest and remain "up to speed".

Book publishers have the same problem. In an effort to be out front, publishers now routinely publish books based upon beta software. Books published based upon knowledge at this "Wet paint" stage inevitably are inaccurate when the product becomes "real". While I recognize the value of early information, I have stopped spending good money on expensive books that will become inaccurate in a matter of weeks at best.

In his book, David Yak devotes a "Timeline of Events" page to describing the frantic milestones that led to publication of this book on 7/10/2009, Silverlight 3's formal release date. I applaud his efforts to tell us about the "real" product, something that, in my view, is more ethical than his counterparts. Yes, we developers thirst for early information, but we want that information to be as accurate as possible.

This book reflects the rush to market. Typos and a great deal of bad grammar exist. But, that doesn't really matter to me! I certainly got my money's worth from the content even though an English teacher would have marked up most pages. I'm new to Silverlight and haven't leveraged WPF - yet. I needed a "Sesame Street" level of introduction to the product and the development environment before trying to implement anything. I got much more than that!

Most technical books on new technology suffer from a "can't see the forest for the trees" syndrome. They plunge into details before the reader has built any "mental mailboxes" to contain it and keep it in proper context, thus generating as many questions as it does answers. Not so with this book. It introduces the reader to the product, development tools, and suggested development strategies in an effective manner. After reading it, I know where I'm going with my project and have some well-developed ideas on just how to get there. Thanks David! You certainly delivered what you promised!

I really enjoyed reading this book, I like the format and the fact that it goes straight from XAML introduction to MVVM in less than 200 pages! The author don't spend too much time explaining what a Rectangle is and how you can animate it... (we don't really care, right) and focus more on features that will help you build RIA business application.

I really like the chapter on architectures presenting an overview of MVVM, Prism, CLSA, IdeaBlade and .NET RIA Services! I gives you a good starting point to learn about these new framework/pattern.

I definitely recommend this book for any .NET developer willing to quickly become up to date with Silverlight 3; in fact, as a Silverlight Trainer myself I bought several dozens to give to my students.

Note that this book is a premise of a next book focused even more on building business applications using Silverlight, so keep an eye on [...]...

I skipped Silverlight versions 1 and 2. Now that it is on version 3, I believe it should have matured enough for me to learn about it and start developing business applications with it. I have no background in the earlier versions nor any idea from what the competitors do (Adobe). Yet, with this book, I was able to bring myself up to speed and I am now midway in building a trading application using Silverlight. I'm happy to learn that I was able to reuse all that I know in developing business applications in .NET when developing Silverlight apps. This book indeed bridges the gap with what I know and what I don't know in order to get to the next level of developing highly interactive business applications.

The chapter I appreciate the most is Chapter 10, which discusses various architectures/patterns/frameworks where Silverlight can fit in.

My review does not have the "Amazon Verified Purchase" label because I personally did not buy the book. My company bought this book at amazon.com for our team.

Having read just the first few pages of this book, I was absolutely appalled at the poor writing. I am not referring to those picky aspects of grammar that exist to give English teachers a reason to live. No, I am referring to important concepts of writing that make the difference between noise and communication.

This book has at least three writing flaws on every page. One pervasive mistake is the omission of commas where they are needed. Sometimes writers use commas unnecessarily. This author does the opposite, which is to omit commas in places where a comma could make the difference between having to read a sentence once and having to read it two or three times to get the proper meaning.

The author needs to read a good book on writing well. I recommend any book by William Zinser, such as this one: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Even putting aside the author's writing style and grammatical errors, I found myself confused or unenlightened after reading many sections of the book. For example, the following sentence appears on page 47: "Silverlight supports having a code-behind file." Then the book fails to explain what a code-behind file is. (Now in the author's defense, I'll say that perhaps I was supposed to know certain things when I started reading the book. I am an experienced Unix C++ developer, but I am just now getting my feet wet with C# and Silverlight.)

Another example: I desperately wanted to understand Silverlight data binding, so I had high expectations when I started Chapter 5, "Using Data and Data Binding Basics." I finished the chapter almost as confused as I started.

The book would benefit from the following:
o Better writing.
o Spending time to get it right. I think the book's release was rushed to coincide with the release of Silverlight 3.
o Editing.
o More editing.
o The usage of styles to make such things as variable names stand out appropriately from other text.
o A more comprehensive index. I found myself visiting the index several times and not finding the term for which I searched. Example: "code behind"
o Better screen snapshots. They are a bit fuzzy, possibly because the screen was in color and the book is not.

Silverlight 3 Jumpstart does have some good points:

o The length of the book is about right for an introduction.

o To me as a novice Silverlight programmer, the choice of topics seems reasonable. You cannot cover every aspect of a complicated technology in a 200-page book.

o The author does seem to be an authority on the subject. I suspect that he is a better classroom instructor than book writer.

Future editions of this book may have potential. The author needs to work on his writing skills and team up with a competent editor who actually will read the book word for word.

This was a good, readable and useful book. Though spending a lot of space on various kinds of service interaction was beyond the scope, that's all this book really needs to be complete.

Where to begin?
This is supposed to be an overview or 'jump start', the author stresses it is a high level view... and yet most of the book is code examples, which is fine - I wanted to learn at the top level about the architecture and how to get started with the coding. The problem with this book is that it doesn't give a whole lot of context to the code that is thrown at you. When you generate a starting project in Silverlight, you get quite a bit of stuff in the solution that is generated for you. The examples give VERY little guadance as to WHERE each piece of code in a given example is placed within this solution framework, and you are left guessing. Not much architecture in terms of the functional 'where does this go' guidance is given. Also the book is riddled with errors. Ranging from the 'We'll cover that in Chapter 3' (when you are already in chapter 12, the last chapter of the book - and chapter 3 does NOT cover what they are talking about), to just plain bad programming errors. This book is fairly useless on a high level (too much code, not enough layout of architecture), as well as down on a nuts & bolts detail level (too vague, too many errors).
A waste of money.