Silverlight 2 Bible

Before picking up this book, I had little idea the power that Silverlight has. I had heard it referred to as "flash killer" but that was about it. Brad does a great job at presenting the building blocks of Silverlight in a straightforward readable way, that makes sense. I was able to go through the examples without any problem, and by the time I finished the book felt like I had a good grip on the subject matter. This book was well written, and gave me a better understanding of the subject, what how it works, and what the possibilities are by using Silverlight.

Very helpful. Index leads me to where I want to be. Good even for a beginner in WPF and Silverlight 2.

This book covers a lot of ground. The authors successfully used concise code examples to explain many concepts and show off many of Silverlight 2.0 capabilities. By the time you're done reading through this book, you would have learned not just basic stuff such as how to create, style, customize, and animate different kinds of Silverlight user interface controls, but also how to: build Silverlight-enhanced ASP.Net applications, add metadata to video files and access them programmatically, divide up your application to support fast initial download retrieving additional xaml or content only when needed, fire off background worker threads to keep your application responsive, access remote services via WebClient, HttpWebRequest/Response or plain old TCP sockets, and work with XML and SQL Data Sources via LINQ. The code samples were constructed with Silverlight 2 Beta 1, but I didn't find a download link. Overall, I think this book is very well written and you will learn a lot from it!