Wednesday 24 November 2010

Pro Silverlight 3 in C# by Matthew Macdonald, Apress

I can honestly say that Matthew Macdonald and Apress have created a book that covers almost every aspect of Silverlight 3 in C#. I had not used Silverlight before and was not sure whether this book would be aimed at beginners.

After reading the first few chapters I found that I not only understood the design philosophy of Silverlight but I was also able to get my hands dirty and create my first Silverlight application. I quickly started to learn about the fundamentals of Silverlight and start to learn about XAML which is a markup language used to instantiate .NET objects. Further on I learnt about layouts, events, elements, models and navigation. There is also a very good reference into shapes, animation, video and sound. As you progress deeper into the book you find that it helps you understand the more intrinsic parts of Silverlight such as template, controls, data binding and isolated storage.

I really like the way the author has managed to create concise and simple to understand examples throughout the book. Sometimes programming books shows examples that can confuse the reader and you are forced to read the text many times to understand it. However this book does not fall into that trap and I found myself actually understanding and thoroughly enjoying this book.

One of my favourite parts is the data binding chapter. It takes you through simple two way data binding data and shows off the validation features of Silverlight 3. Again with simple real day to day examples this chapter shows of the power of data binding in Silverlight.

Overall the book took me through all the concepts of Silverlight and it has become an invaluable resource that I use on a day to day basis overall I would rate this book 9.5/10

I can truthfully say that I can recommend this book 100%