Rating  - A great introduction to Silverlight. Not a desktop reference
With the very recent release of Silverlight 2.0 to the web by Microsoft, this book is now slightly dated however I'm sure Wrox will be releasing an updated version of this book shortly to cover the new 2.0 release and all the enhancements that it brings with it.
One thing that immediately strikes you about this book is that it is in color. With the subject matter at hand I think that this decision was a very good one after all it is would be very difficult to show off the power of Silverlight and to get some of the examples showing correctly with just grey scale.
For a Wrox book this one is fairly small weighing in at just 288 pages, however you will find everything you need to know to get you started using Silverlight in this book. It does not cover everything in detail and therefore I would consider it to be a "starter" book. One that you will pick up to get the basics of the technology, know how it works and how to do use it quickly and easily.
Silverlight 1.0 is built atop a cut-down version of XAML, Microsoft's graphical language that is used mainly in desktop applications and was introduced with Microsoft .Net 3.0.
The book starts with an explanation of what Silverlight is. It does mention the "forthcoming" Silverlight 1.1 stack which is what was recently released as Silverlight 2.0. The book continues by giving a quick overview of the tools that you can use to build a Silverlight application, where to get the SDK and runtime, some examples of it's uses then gives a quick breakdown of default Silverlight application that is used in Visual Studio.
The next chapter gives a brief introduction to XAML and some of the various elements that Silverlight makes use of. There are plenty of examples given and some visual tricks thrown in for those of us that are not graphically inclined (I definitely include myself in this department). There is enough in this chapter to give you the basics for building your own Silverlight application including animations, video and basic shapes and transforms.
With the introduction of XAML, Microsoft released a tool specifically for designing applications using this language, Microsoft Expression Blend. Chapter 3 deals with how you use blend to create your XAML files and how to incorporate these into your Visual Studio project. One of the benefits of Expression Blend is that you can hand off the design aspect of the project to a graphical designer on your team and the resulting code fits very neatly in with Visual Studio so that developers don't need to worry about this aspect. Again this is a quick introduction to Expression Blend and it does not go into depth of every option that Expression Blend offers but gives you enough that you can get started and build projects.
Silverlight 1.0 was programmed with Javascript only. This has changed with the release of Silverlight 2.0 which now offers a subsection of the .Net Framework and the ability to program in C#, VB.Net etc. The next couple of chapters deal with programming Silverlight 1.0, hooking up events, how to incorporate Silverlight into your page and how it can interact with the code in your web page. Again plenty of examples are given.
A quick introduction to Silverlight 1.1 is given however this has now been superseded with Silverlight 2.0 and some of the features have changed since Silverlight 1.1 so the small chapter on this is not really relevant anymore.
Finally the authors give you a full blown Silverlight Video application and explain it works. The previous chapters in this book give you enough information to create applications such as this and Video was mainly the target for Silverlight 1.0, therefore this example is great for showing what you can create and the potential power of Silverlight 1.0.
Although this book is really a brief introduction to Silverlight 1.0, the authors explain the concepts well and give you enough information to get you going, creating your own Silverlight applications. As mentioned, this book is targeted towards people who are interested in learning Silverlight and not an in-depth desktop reference for those who are already using it. The easy to understand explanations mixed with the full color graphics and code markup makes this an excellent book for those who are wanting to get their feet with with Microsoft Silverlight. The main downfall of this book being the very recent release of Silverlight 2.0, although the concepts learned in this book are just as relevant for Silverlight 2.0 as they are for Silverlight 1.0.
Rating - Great intro to Silverlight 1.0
Being a novice programmer, I found Silverlight 1.0 a great overview of the functionality of Silverlight. I especially liked the code details and visual examples the authors used to illustrate key features using multiple methods from a basic text editor to the Expression Blend application as well as Visual Studio. I'm looking forward to working through the examples, the Video Player case study looks interesting.
Rating - Great Silverlight Reference
'Silverlight 1.0' is one of the new generation of Wrox books (the red ones) that sport full color and a great new layout. This update to the Wrox line has been long coming and what a difference it makes! With the reduced costs of color content it's completely unacceptable for any of the big publishing houses to release any books that need color without it and I am glad Wrox put up the extra money to do things right!! Silverlight is Microsoft's competitor to Adobe (Macromedia) Flash and if you have ever seen some of the capabilities of Silverlight you will know that this is an important technology that is around to stay! Heavily based off of XAML and open source standards, Microsoft has really done things right with this new technology and this is a great book to get your feet wet and start learning!!
If you are a Silverlight developer and want to start creating great Silverlight applications, pick up this book and you will be well on your way. Written well in a beautiful new package, this is a great introduction to get up and running TO-DAY!!
**** RECOMMENDED
Rating  - This is a book that will help you to get up at speed with this fantastic new technology from Microsoft
This is a book that will help you to get up at speed with this fantastic new technology from Microsoft, this book gives you all the information you need to start developing some great Silverlight apps.
I really appreciate the fact that has all the pictures and code in color, it helps a lot to understand, also I appreciate the fact that the authors didn't went so deep in the HTML/JavaScript details, instead they went straight to the core of Silverlight and how to use it.
I have to say that I got the book, and I couldn't stop to read. This is one of those books that you will like to have on your side has a reference when you are working on any Silverlight project.
After this book I gain more interest for the XAML, WPF that Microsoft has been doing with the new version of .NET framework ( .NET 3.5).
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