Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2

When first learning Silverlight 2, I picked up this book and got up to speed very quickly. It was a great introduction with lots of building block examples. I like practical books with lots of examples, so this book was great.

Laurence has done an amazing job on this book. "Introducing Silverlight 2" is the perfect followup to his previous book, which illustrated the concepts of Silverlight 1.0. The book goes into great details with the various features of Silverlight 2. I highly recommend it as a training resource and development reference for all Silverlight users.

Laurence Moroney's book is a wonderful introduction to Silverlight 2, and he produced this when folks need it, just when Silverlight 2 is new. He did this by hard work, and by knowing the product inside and out (and he's providing continuing support through release and beyond.) The book is extremely well written and well organzied, with solid coverage of all the core topics and a good bit beyond (including extensive coverage of Deep Zoom, interacting with ASP.NET and using Dynamic Languages such as Ruby) Moroney is one of the most knowledgable writers about Silverlight, and his style is straight forward and to the point. This book is everything you might want in an introduction to programming Silverilght 2, and I would not hesitate in recommending it. Jesse Liberty Senior Program Manager - Microsoft Developer Community Liasion

This review refers to the beta 2 version of the book. This book is exactly what the title says - it is a good, solid introduction to programming Silverlight 2 beta 2 in C#. Laurence does a good job of covering all of the basics of writing Silverlight applications - his web site has a good table of contents (http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/) which clearly describes the books contents. One of the features of the book that I especially like is the valuable information about how to run Silverlight from a Linux system and also information about using Silverlight with PHP, Java, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, Ruby, and IronPython. Laurence has been very responsive in helping to resolve any issue with the code that I have had. The book's code is Silverlight 2 beta 2; however, there has been one minor upgrade and I am sure that there will be more so having good response from the author is very important when dealing with beta software. I do highly recommend this book as a basic introduction to writing Silverlight 2 beta 2 code in C#. David Roh

This book has a great introduction of Silverlight 1.0, and had a nice flow of documentation that made the book a fun read. The book covered the silverlight platform well, and illustrated a few examples of how Silverlight can work in conjunction with a few other technologies like Asp.net and PHP. The book had very good code samples to illustrate specific points of Silverlight 1.0 technology, and additionally included a good primer on the upcoming Silverlight 1.1. Overall I think this book is a great resource to get up and running on Silverlight in a short period of time.