Microsoft Expression Blend Bible

As a non User Interface or Design expert, this book was very helpful for me. I was looking for a book which give me a introduction to design aspects related to Microsoft Expression Blend, and this book have a lot of useful information. However, I expect more content/stuff in specific subjects, but 700 pages are very limited for a complex subject as WPF and a new tool as Microsoft Expression Blend. If you are a developer, you have WPF skills, and you want to take a very first approach to Microsoft Expression Blend, this book will help you.

I saw some of the mediocre reviews on this book and nearly didn't buy it. But I'm most glad I did. The writing is clear, the examples are well chosen, and I appreciated the authors' including material on what makes a good UI and how to use Blend to produce one. Some reviewers called that padding, and I suppose if one is a UI expert, they could be. But to me, they were interesting and suggested ways that I can employ the Blend techniques that the book is teaching me. I agree with one of the other reviewers that the book is lite (actually quite lite) on coding. Because I come from a coding and not UI background that was OK with me. The only real problem I see with this book is its title. A true Blend Bible would be 10,000 pages long. I'd say this book is more like a mid-depth, practical, well-written introduction to the major graphical features of a product with a huge feature set. It's a book I'll keep, too. Lots to come back for reference.

This is a good book to learn Blend. It presents lots of material on how to use Blend to create user interfaces that make heavy use of graphics, animation, 3D, and video, and it presents principles of user interface design, too. The book is easy to read and easy to use. It could have gone into more depth on coding details, so the title "Bible" may be a misnomer. The chapters of the book that contain code seem pretty basic, so this book is probably better for someone who wants to use the graphics features of Blend (which are very extensive) rather than do programming. The book's Web site www.blendtips.com is useful, too.