Pro Windows Phone 7 Development Paperback – 12 May 2011

This book is well written and easy to read and follow. I am so tired of reading programming books by people who can't write meaningful sentences or paragraphs. That wasn't the case here. I read this book cover-to-cover before I started trying out the code (something that I rarely do). If the stars were just for writing style, I'd give it 5.

This book (like many others) is mostly about Silverlight and touches on XNA in the last two chapters. I would much rather see a book completely on either Silverlight or XNA, at least until we start talking Mango and how these technologies can be integrated. I can't imagine that somebody wanting to learn XNA game programming would buy this book for Chapters 7 & 8 (because there are books dedicated to XNA programming that covers XNA in greater detail), or that they'd be useful to a Silverlight developer. I wrote an XNA game prototype much like this one in just a few days (quite easy to do, particularly by using Microsoft's create.msdn.com samples, as this book does). I would have much rather seen a full blown Silverlight game/app in Chapters 7 & 8, using the techniques described in the previous chapters.

Originally I had said this book shouldn't have been called "Pro", but "Intermediate" instead. This book covers topics at different levels. It's not consistently "Intro", "Intermediate", or "Pro" - but a mix of those categories. Chapters 1 is an intro, 2 is basic UI, and 3 is about input. Chapter 4 is where it gets interesting and includes some advanced topics, but they seem glossed over. The "Plain Old REST+JSON" topic on pages 228-237 is mostly code, and talks more about the sample app's UI than about REST, JSON, communications, or serialization/deserialization. In my opinion Web Services really should be an entire chapter here, not just a few subsections of one. Chapter 5 "advanced UI", should be called "Intro to MVVM & the Silverlight Toolkit Controls". Chapter 6 has lots of good stuff, but it seems as if what didn't fit elsewhere got thrown into it. Chapter 7 & 8 make a very simple 2D XNA game (mostly by aggregating MSDN samples) & display a 3D model. With all of the topics the book covers (and it covers a lot of them), it feels cramped at just 440 pages. I would prefer to see chapters 4 & 6 expanded and broken into multiple chapters and this book to weigh in at 650-700 pages.

Note that in an earlier release of this book's code on the Apress site, the readme.txt file was missing form the .zip file. It contains critical instructions for getting the code in Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 to compile (you need to download & install a few things first). My earlier review pointed this out and the publisher immediately got me in touch with the author - and they've been very responsive to my comments. The file is now available, so if you had trouble compiling the code before, look at the readme.txt and try again. I just used the latest instructions tonight and all of the code now compiles & runs (although I am still having a little trouble an exception in the Chapter 6 code which may be a result of a problem in my OData Client setup).

So there is room for improvement, but I really like this book and I'm glad I bought it. I bought it primarily for Chapters 4 & 6, but I've found chapters 3 & 5 useful as well. It's well written & the author is very responsive too. Recommended.

Considering not so many choices on kindle books talking about wp7 dev, i would say it's worth reading for a deep wp7 developer. However, finally I found it's a bad idea to read programing books on ebook reader or PC becasue of the funny page layout and format. If you could wait, get a paper copy.