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If a program book has many code examples included, and the reader can not compile and run the example code, then the book is worthless.

That’s how this book was written. The authors did not care to make sure the code examples are even compilable – traces of copy/paste that crack everywhere.

What do they have in mind? Just the ravings about how great Silverlight 3 is?

It suppose to be a book for learning, not a book of preaching.
Rating: 1 / 5

This book is awesome. The authors do a great job of balancing Reference with Tutorials and General Insight. Whatever you do, do not skip the Introduction. It provides some great background then guidance on how to use the book.

I’ve quitely sat back and watched Silverlight mature at a very quick rate, but we could never trust it for our Line of Business (LOB) apps because the data binding was not there. Now, with RIA Data Services and the new controls we are leaving ASP.NET and AJAX frameworks as quickly as we can.

With the help of this fine book, I was able to build CRUDs and transaction processing code for our existing LOB app in four hours. Four hours and we have replaced what took us a few weeks to write in older technologies. And we are using SL 4, so don’t think this book is now outdated. We relied extensively on “Chapter 5-Controls” to employ the native DataGrid. It had all we needed to write production quality code. If we want to really tune the grid with some more obscure attributes we’ll just search it up online.

If you want the absolute nth level of reference then do what the rest of us do… search then read it online. This book was never intended to be the end-all reference, just a good balance between Reference, Tutorials, and General Insight. As founding member of our .NET Users Group I will recommend it every chance I get to our members.
Rating: 5 / 5

I knew I was in trouble when I found myself in chapter 5 – Controls and had not read anything of value up to that point, only to find that the authors didn’t find controls important enough to cover in detail. The entire Chapter is 15 pages long. This would be fine in a book that is not claiming to be a reference, but in a reference I expected detailed coverage of every control available.

I find the chapters are filled with scattered information and there is no real logical flow to them. None of them go into any depth, and they remain at surface level coverage of the material.

One of the reasons I bought the book is it says in several places that Silverlight 3 includes new functionality to build line-of-business applications, but they never cover line-of-business applications.

Validation, which is new functionality, is cover in two pages with a goofy example that doesn’t work in the downloadable code. They didn’t provide a way for the control to lose focus, so it never validates. This is how most of the functionality topics are covered.

There is a lot of filler chatter that adds no value. It is presented in a format that makes it look valuable, but just isn’t.

The appendixes are filled with worthless overviews of the available api’s.

All in all I deeply regret buying this book. I should have been more patient and waited for Matthew MacDonald’s Silverlight 3.0 book, which I am going to have to buy now anyway.

Rating: 1 / 5