Great book - for more advanced programmers
Book review - "Silverlight Recipes - A problem-solution approach, by Jit Ghosh and Rob Cameron. ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-2435-8
Hi, I was excited to get this book for review from the programmers user group I belong to, because it deals with Silverlight. I had previously read some very basic Silverlight books, while they were useful, they were also a little too basic in many respects.
While this book is still based on Silverlight 3.0, (Silverlight 4.0 just came out, but there are hardly any books in print yet on the subject) it still proved a very worthwhile read for me.
It has about 990 pages of invaluable Silverlight programming information!
One of the neat features about this book is; it's not your standard textbook like material, each chapter in the book focuses on a specific area of Silverlight programming and uses what they call "recipes". Recipes, in this books context are basically full-blown working code examples that show how to solve particular programming problems with Silverlight.
Each recipe has 4 sections.
1. Problem - A short description of what problem the recipe is trying to solve programmatically.
2. Solution - A short explanation of what the solution for the recipe will be.
3. How it Works - A more detailed explanation showing the details of the programming solution
4. The Code - Real-life working Silverlight projects that solve the recipe's intent.
So, each recipe has a consistent format and you can look at the table of contents to find each type of recipe you want to experiment with!, then simply go to the source code and load it up in your Visual Studio environment.
Here is a list of the chapters, so you can get an idea of what types of recipes are within the chapters.
Chapter 1 - A quick tour of Silverlight development
Chapter 2 - Application Design and Programming Model
Chapter 3 - Developing User Experiences
Chapter 4 - Data Binding
Chapter 5 - Controls
Chapter 6 - Browser Integration
Chapter 7 - Networking and Web Service Integration
Chapter 8 - Integrating Rich Media
Chapter 9 - Building LOB (line of business applications)
I like this type of format (Recipes), because if one was to study each recipe, he or she can become well versed on the different types of programming problems one would be expected to know how to solve with Silverlight programming.
I also think that the use of Silverlight will take off because it has become a viable technology to use when writing business applications. ASP.NET, WINFORMS, WPF, JAVA clients, PHP websites, JSP websites, AJAX technologies all have a new competitor to building very rich business applications and its name is Silverlight, so I think learning Silverlight is a "must" for any serious .net programmer.
Don't forget that Silverlight is very well suited for animations, media content (such as video streaming) as well as game programming, not to mention the new features such as RIA services which make building business applications (database retrievals/updates etc.) much more powerful with Silverlight than in versions 1 and 2.
I really like Silverlight and plan to study all I can with the technology so I can master this, it can become a worthy tool for a programmer to have in his or her arsenal.
This book is highly recommended, in fact I was giving a Silverlight demo at my work (a large IT shop in Southern California) and this book helped me understand how to solve certain problems for my demo (for example master / detail XAML with a datagrid control).
I feel this book is handy to have at your side as you find yourself needing to solve problems with Silverlight programming. This book is probably not your beginner level book, it assumes you have some knowledge of Silverlight, so maybe first read a beginning Silverlight book and then you can move up to this one.
Highly recommended!
