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Pro Silverlight 3 in C#

Book Review
Friday 5 March 2010.
 

Pro Silverlight 3 in C#
By Matthew MacDonald
ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2381-8
ISBN10: 1-4302-2381-2
Print Book Price: $49.99 / £39.49
eBook Price: $34.99
APress: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430223812
Computer Manuals: http://www.computermanuals.co.uk

Silverlight is Microsoft’s browser-based ‘rich internet application’ technology and it is a competitor to Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash. At almost 800 pages in length [1], this book looks as though it should be a fairly comprehensive guide to Silverlight 3.

Well, I’m not really sure than even 800 pages is enough to do justice to all of Silverlight 3 and the various tools and technologies that underpin it. Even so, this book provides a pretty thorough introduction to Silverlight development. Its twenty chapters cover topics ranging from the fundamentals of design and layout through to more specialist topics such as ASP.NET, web services, data binding and multithreading.

The author’s assumption throughout is that he is addressing programmers rather than designers and that their primary IDE is Visual Studio rather than Microsoft’s design-oriented Silverlight tool, Expression Blend. Expression Blend is covered briefly but this coverage is principally in the rather lightweight sections on styling an application.

I have to say that this is exactly the sort of programming book that I like. While the chapters can be read and each sample project can be loaded in strict sequential order (the sample code is available for download), it is also a great book for ‘dipping into’. Personally, I am one of life’s confirmed book-dippers so it suits me well. What’s more, having dipped into a few chapters, I can attest to the fact that I have learnt some useful things about Silverlight programming, which is, I guess, the best compliment a reviewer can pay to a programming book.

The book is nicely laid out with plenty of code samples and screenshots in the text. The code is printed with syntax colouring so it not only clear but it also looks a lot less intimidating than the stark black-and-white code blocks found in many books of this sort.

The same author has also written a book called ‘Pro Silverlight 3 in VB’ which I presume to be the Visual Basic equivalent to the C# book though I haven’t seen that title so can’t comment in detail. What I can say is that the C# edition is a fine guide for a C# programmer who needs to get to grips with Silverlight 3.

[1] the APress site says this book has 640 pages but I can assure you that in my copy the page numbers stop at 792

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