Developpez.com writers said
Recently, I decided to dive into Silverlight. Curious about this framework, but not having a big experience of WPF, I looked for a book to go through the beginner phase and the basic concepts, but is also as a reference once the initial learning stage has passed.
Silverlight In Action hit the spot for both these needs.
After introducting Silverlight, as well as a discussion on how to integrate Silverlight into web pages, the two following chapters cover over seventy pages the different types of layout, and the controls available in the framework. These chapters have, in my opinion, a good balance between the amount of code and explanation, given that each control is described with a short example of code and a screenshot of the result, each snippet / capture being focused on a single control.
The next two chapters introduce data binding (similar, if less rich than in WPF) and the various means of communication available (Web services, WCF, JSON, RSS and sockets, the roundup is complete). Complexity, particularly the chapter on communication, raises a little bit.
The next three chapters were the hardest for me, as they relate to multimedia content, vector graphics and animations. Although this is not my forte, these chapters are quite didactic and detailed enough to get at least an understanding of these topics sufficient to spice up a Silverlight project (do not expect to start a game in 2d after the chapter on animation) .
The final chapters will address the styling of controls and components (to provide a coherent and original user interface ), as well as some topics covered more quickly, such as Isolated Storage, the DLR, and other information on hosting.
All in all, this book is excellent to begin SilverLight, but also to come back regularly. The only bemol is the lack of a common thread to the book, allowing, for example, see the construction of an application, iteratively, starting from the layout to the accommodation. Another black spot is the website "companion" to the book, which is mentioned several times in the book, which consists altogether in a single page with links to the code samples and the book home page.
Stephen G. Holdorf said
This has to be the worst programming book that I have ever read. No good code samples and only snippets of markup. DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!
Nicholas Nystrom said
At some point between reading Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition (Microsoft Programming Series) and now, I stopped buying tech books, mostly because online documentation, blogs, and IDE intelligence features have made dead-tree tomes redundent. However, after 18 months of not picking up XAML/WPF/Silverlight through osmosis, I figured this technology was going to require a few hours of cover-to-cover reading before I groked it.
Unfortunatley this has been a reminder to me of why I don't buy tech books anymore.
This isn't a knock to Chad or John--they've written a good introduction to Silverlight 2--it's simply that I couldn't be any further from their target audience.
Two assumptions are made throughout the book: the reader knows little to nothing about forms development of any kind and the reader has never heard of Silverlight prior to picking up this book.
Both might be valid assumptions for many readers, but to put it bluntly, this book is only just over 300 pages, and a great deal of that space is spent on pedantic descriptions of the general behavior of buttons, checkboxes and the like, and includes far too many trivial code samples.
For example, when describing the various font rendering options, instead of including one code sample that set all five attributes and then referencing that sample as each attribute is described, five seperate samples are included, each setting only one property. Frankly, I already know what Italics means, could take a guess if I didn't, and passages that can be paraphrased as "setting FontStyle to Italics makes text Italic" are not useful to anyone.
A further criticism is the Silverlight fanboy attitude of the book. When writing technical documentation, please do not try to tell me how great a technology is. I'm reading the book already, so I must think it has some value. However, as a forms engine, Silverlight is inferior to almost anything else except Flash, to which it is at best par. It is far slower and less accessible than either a thick client app or a standard html form, and provides almost no additional value in a business app. It's text rendering is abysmal, unable to kern text, unable to properly render anti-aliased text on any platform (something Flash and cross-platform browsers like Safari seem to do very well). And it has an installed base that's still miniscule compared to Flash: not even Microsoft uses it for its own animated banner ads.
Silverlight IS getting better though, and I think everyone sees that it will be an honest Flash alternative within the next few years, but right now it has exactly one thing going for it: .NET. I can leverage my existing multi-decade investment in the Microsoft platform to reach a space I couldn't before. Yet, as this book is aimed squarly at someone without any depth of experience, it ultimatley provided very little value for me.
J. M. Gorman said
When learning a new technology, I typically pick up at least one book to capture the zen of that new technology. This book failed me in this regard.
Jay said
This book really helps me to understand silverlight well.
I'm not a web developer, but more like just normal software developer. So I didn't have lots of conecepts for web developer and current web development trends.
This book provides those valuable information to me and it really helps me to fully understand how I can start development with Silverlight.
Comments