- Paperback: 425 pages
- Publisher: Manning Publications; 1 edition (4 Nov 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1933988428
- ISBN-13: 978-1933988429
- Product Dimensions: 23.3 x 18.8 x 2.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 918,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Microsoft describes Silverlight as a "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." That's a really boring description for a really exciting new technology. Anyone who has looked at the demos and gotten a taste of what Silverlight can do knows that Silverlight represents an entirely new level of rich web interface technology for Microsoft developers. With Silverlight 2, developers can use JavaScript, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby to build user-friendly, interactive, and visually-dazzling web applications that work in most major browsers.
Silverlight 2 in Action is the first book to cover Silverlight 2, a far more robust implementation of Silverlight than the current 1 release that supports only JavaScript. The much-anticipated 2 release adds powerful new features along with the ability to code in multiple languages and integrate your work with Visual Studio and the new Expression suite of tools. This book delivers real-world examples and in-depth walkthroughs to help you confidently enhance your web applications using Silverlight 2.
Silverlight 2 in Action devotes extensive coverage to flexible layout components, the extensible control model, the communication framework, and the data-binding features "all cornerstones of software development. Author and Microsoft MVP Chad Campbell also describes rich media and vivid graphical and animation features. The final chapters include a variety of Silverlight deployment scenarios.
In addition to the fundamentals of Silverlight, you'll be introduced to architectural components such as the Silverlight object model. The book addresses the developer/designer collaboration model Silverlight enables, showing the developer how to include the designer effectively in the project workflow. This model is illustrated throughout the examples.
For ongoing reader support, the author will maintain a dedicated book-support website providing up-to-the-minute working examples, complete with source code, all in Silverlight.
About the Author
Chad Campbell is a Microsoft MVP and solutions architect. He has been developing enterprise-level web applications with a wide variety of technologies since 1999. Beginning with the initial public release of what would become Silverlight in 2006, Chad hit the ground running and has not looked back. He holds MCSD and MCTS certifications. In addition, Chad has a BS degree from Purdue University where he focused his studies on computer science and minored in psychology.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, ineffective, and without substance,
By
This review is from: Silverlight 2 in Action (Paperback)
Many computer books are bad, but thankfully one quickly learns to tell them apart from the good ones. In this case, however, I failed.When I received this book I was surprised that it was so thin: 350 pages is not much to cover a topic as extensive as Silverlight. But in an industry that tends to value volume over quantity I mistakenly took that as a good sign. In fact, most of this book is made with filler. It has a number of step-by-step tutorials that make extensive use of gratuitous screenshots, but worse: it contains the most egregious collection of thoroughly useless snippets of example code that I have ever seen, as well as the lowest proportion of useful running code I have ever encountered. This is further compounded by the fact that the authors' grasp of Web technology is thin at best. They come across as confusing HTML and the DOM on a few occasions, cannot tell the difference between JSON and Javascript, and have the most bizarre use of the word plug-in that I have ever seen, sometimes using it for the Silverlight browser extension (the regular use), but mostly using it to mean either the Silverlight content that is being brought in, or the object/embed elements. At some point they seem to be very unsure of their footing as they go on to explain a trivial piece of Javascript (which takes them a good twenty pages). Finally, the authors repeat themselves copiously even outside the examples, which, given how verbose XAML is, already make up over half of the length. They are also rather doe-eyed and may for instance explain five paragraphs in a row that Silverlight can run on 96% of connected computers without ever indicating on how many it actually does run (a much lower number), or just quote a piece XAML without ever commenting on some of its surprising syntactical choices. I cannot emphasise strongly enough how this book will teach you nothing useful. I came to it with a simple project that I wanted to try in Silverlight and I still have no idea how I could go about it. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that after reading this book I'd know how to get a Hello World to work in the browser. I certainly wish I could have my money back.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply a great book on Silverlight,
By
This review is from: Silverlight 2 in Action (Paperback)
I bought this book at the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles last week and started reading it on the plane home...I must say that I already knew quite a lot on Silverlight, but this book still amazed me. It's clear, contains the right number of samples and correct information and is in my opinion a great book to start Silverlight 2 development. If you have no experience with the platform, or if you have already (some) knowledge about it, this book will give you all the information you need. A word on the reading style: the book is one of the easiest books I have ever read (and I have read quite a lot...). The last sentence(s) of a paragraph already introduces the upcoming one, giving it a really interesting flow. Also, because of this, you easily make links between the several topics you're reading. In conclusion, a great book!
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another good Manning title but there's better,
By
This review is from: Silverlight 2 in Action (Paperback)
Good but Silverlight in 350pg means there's something sacrificed. Previous Manning books (even the recent WPF in Action one) have been excellent striking out from the crowd with a well-thoughtout approach to revealing the topics in a cohesive way. This title falls a little short and is outstripped by the excellent Silverlight 2 Unleashed (SAMS, Bugnion) though in fairness still much better than O'Reilly's recent offering.Some topics (and anything WPF related qualifies) are just BIG and need to be fully exploded to garner understanding.
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