Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2: Data Access and Web Services for Rich Internet Applications

My favorite parts of this book include data binding and ado.net data services. I did wish that john covered asp.net ajax a bit deeper and went into sql custom domain modeling. John papa writes for msdn magazine and his books and articles are a pleasure to read....

I've just started to dig my way into Silverlight 2 and this book has been invaluable in getting me up to speed on the technology. If you don't know anything about WPF or XAML, you may want to get a primer book to accompany this, but once you're up to speed on the basics, this book will take you to the next step of getting your Silverlight applications talking to a variety of services in a variety of ways. For me, the chapters on using REST services and ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) were invaluable in getting my application going. If you want to learn how to effectively use Silverlight in a data-based application, you'll definitely find some useful information here.

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 book is the best one I have found to address this aspect of Silverlight development. 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 real applications.

As one who interacts with Silverlight beginners and experts on a daily basis, I will tell you that the #1 questions are always with regard to accessing information (data) from Silverlight. This book covers all the basics and the advanced for anyone to really understand. Providing samples in both C# and Visual Basic, John does a great job providing the information you need to be successful. This should be required reading/reference for ANY Silverlight developer.