Book Review: Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight

In learning Silverlight, I think that the major hurdle for a .NET developer is to learn and familiarized himself with Expression Blend. In my quest to learn Blend, I recently bought Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight by Victor Gaudioso and published by friends of ED.

First of all, the book was released almost on the same date as Silverlight 3 so I knew that something’s was fishy because writing and publishing a book takes months. Never the less, I gave the book a chance.

The book title is somewhat misleading because there’s not enough focus on Blend itself. It is more like a general Silverlight book targeted at designers wanting to learn a little bit of Blend, a little bit of Visual Studio and a little bit of C#. Keeping that in mind, it gives a quick overview of what it takes to develop with the Silverlight platform.

And the Silverlight 3 content? It is just obvious that the book was written when the technology was in early Beta. That content seems to be have been rushed and inserted at the last minute.

Is it a bad book? Not at all but if you want to focus mostly on Blend, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

 

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3 Comments

  • I am writing a book as well on "Next Generation Business Intelligence with Silverlight 3" and going through the pains of moving my content to RTM from Beta. Lots of screens and coding scenarios need to be redone. However, I refuse to release anything that is going to be done half-right...not fair to the person that invests in my book.

    I think the publishers are giving Silverlight a bad rep. I have never seen so many "intro to some topic" books for Silverlight. A lot of them are MSDN rehashes and even those that aren't spend 1-4 chapters covering stuff a Silverlight developer should know in their sleep :)

  • Hello Guy,
    I am sorry you found the book to be written in a rushed state. The thing is though that it took me seven months to write it and I did in fact write it with a beta version of SL 3 and a non-public version of Blend 3. But I was able to get the major features of SL and Blend 3 in there such as SketchFlow.

    And as for not showing enough of Blend, I am not sure what else I could add. I covered the new Blend 3 IDE extensively in chapter 3 and I showed how to use Blend to create about 10 SL applications.

    Drop me a line sometime if you would like to discuss the matter further.

    Victor Gaudioso
    wpfauthor at gmail dot com

  • I am reading the book now, and I do NOT agree with the review. It's much better than trying to study Blend using the videos on the site.

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