If you're a busy developer who has experience in .NET and want to add to your book collection one great Silverlight resource this book should be the one. The format of this book is "how do you do something?" followed by a concise, pragmatic walk-through to demonstrate "exactly how to do it." So many books and online resources water down their content by trying to explain things in a grand vision; this resource takes a totally different approach. Most of the chapters focus on exactly one problem that would take a day of research and web searching to do, yet actually 10-15 minutes of code or Blend usage to actually do.



Each chapter of this book covers a high-level topic but is broken into individual (re: not one huge, monolithic application you lose track of halfway through) recipes. The topics range from solving problems experienced by the brand new Silverlight developer, like "How to create a new Silverlight project" or "How to run Silverlight on a Mac or Linux computer" to those more complex like "Accessing JSON data (or communicating with Sockets or SOAP) via Silverlight."



An entire chapter is dedicated to line-of-business application development with Silverlight. As browser-based enterprise applications require more GUI richness Silverlight will increase in demand, and I've found so many books decline to focus or pay a lot of attention to the "boring old" LOB application development cycles. Not this text, it demystifies RIA and REST, XAML databinding, and a host of other problems in LOB applications and does so in a concise, no-nonsense manner.



The final chapters cover in this no-nonsense style the features Silverlight offers for multimedia needs by covering how to play and stream media via Silverlight. Some of these examples cover the ins and outs of using IIS 7.0's streaming features to make video playback as smooth as possible, offering a full lifecycle approach, from client-to-web server.



If you're about to embark into the exciting world of Silverlight 4.0 this could be the best resource around. The wealth of information in terms of the topics covered and the pragmatic approach to just answering the questions in a concise manner make this an important resource for the Silverlight developer.