After reading through this book and applying the principles described therein I was able to develop a real world Silverlight application that behaved itself inside of IE, communicated with a WCF service in the back end, retrieved data from a SQL database, then bound that data back into the Silverlight UX. I had prior C#, SQL (cursory), and Web services experience (also cursory) but this book stitched it together for me and showed me how to make my application possible. In that regard it is a very good and practical beginner to intermediate level book for real Silverlight application development. The examples in the book are never trivial and the content is detailed and well written enough that you gain a solid understanding of the technology (not just how to cut and paste sample code). The book didn't let me down until I tried to get into more complicated tasks like rendering my own shapes/geometries and manipulating the XAML DOM in code. For that you'll need to go somewhere else for additional information. If you want to put together fairly typical line of business applications that access services and databases from rich client interfaces written in Silverlight using web based deployment this book will give you most of what you need.