Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

So, I am finally getting around to writing some long-overdue reviews. First up is a great new Silverlight book from Manning Publications – Silverlight 4 in Action, authored by Pete Brown. This is a revised (and expanded and totally revamped) edition of Silverlight 2 in Action by Chad Campbell and John Stockton.

(Full disclosure: I was given a free copy of the eBook for review. However, I had already purchased the MEAP (Manning Early Access Preview) and pre-ordered the print edition of the book earlier this year.)

In short, I absolutely recommend this book. It makes a great introduction to Silverlight and the ultimate reference for experienced developers, all in one book.

I will spare you a rehashing of the table of contents, but the content of book really flows nicely from introductory material to some more advanced topics. There aren’t many parts of the book I would consider optional for serious Silverlight developers. Sometimes when I am reading a tech book, I will feel compelled to skip a section or even an entire chapter because I don’t feel it is relevant to my own practices. Here I think I skimmed a few pages in Chapter 19 – Printing, but that is about it.

If you are a Silverlight developer, looking to move into that space or even have a casual interest in the technology, you will find Silverlight 4 in Action an indispensable guide.

Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown

 

 

 

If you are looking to build a business-focused application with Silverlight, chances are you are going to need to access data of some sort. This is the best book I have found to address this aspect of Silverlight development.

Virtually every method of data access currently available in Silverlight is covered here: LINQ, REST, WCF and more.

I read the book cover-to-cover, but I think it will serve best as a reference guide while developing line-of-business apps with Silverlight. Most of what you see written about Silverlight focuses on shiny UIs. This book gives you what you really need to build RIAs for real business requirements.

Definitely recommended.

 

 

 

 

Are you or anyone know interested in reviewing some Refcardz?

DZone has over 40 titles, and coming up soon they are going to have Tapestry, BPM, SharePoint, WPF, SOA Governance, Core ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, HTML, and more. Just join the mailing list and review the ones that look interesting. The mailing list is here:  http://lists.dzone.com/mailman/listinfo/refcardz-review.

 

Contact me if you have any questions.