Pro Silverlight 2 in C# 2008 Book Review

Matthew has hit the mark again!!! This is a great resource for any level of Silverlight experience. He starts out with an introduction that covers the Visual Studio Silverlight environment. The introduction really helps those who have no experience get rolling right away. Matthew does a great job of covering every feature of Silverlight in great detail, but more importantly he covers every feature left out of Silverlight in detail. He covers the limitations and also how to get the most get the most out of what is there to make up the difference. His chapter on data binding does a great job of pushing the features that are included to there limit, which helps make up for the lack of ADO.NET and a lot of other missing binding features. He covers every out of the box element in detail and includes a nice reference for where the element can be found in the book. He also covers styles and templates, brushes and transforms, shapes and geometries, animation, and layout containers. The book also covers networking, multithreading, isolated storage, browser integration, media and deep zoom, wcf services, the application model, and dependency properties and routed events. The book is very readable for those that like to read cover to cover, but it also makes a great reference. The downloadable code is very usable and very complete. Below is a screenshot of the Elements chapter's sample code running. Click here to see larger image. All in all, if you are interested in Silverlight, this is a must have.