Snowball - The Blog

I was looking at Amazon today and noticed that there were now already 12 reviews on our (Kevin and myself) book, giving the book a whopping 5 star rating, which is of course great!

Here are some of the excerpts:

Ideal for those who prefer a tutorial-oriented writing style, August 30, 2010
HOW THIS COOKBOOK WORKED FOR ME: In contrast, this book ("Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook" from PACKT) certainly proved valuable to me by appealing to my learning style, and delivering what was advertised on the cover. I was able to learn a reasonable amount of SL4 specifically for handling business data, using "Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook". The format and approach is ideal for those among us who prefer to "cut to the chase" instead of wading through lengthy tirades. The examples build on one another which served to reinforce key concepts through out the book-- money well spent from my perspective.

Great Book for Silverlight App Development, June 22, 2010
*Getting ready
*How to do it...
*How it works...
*There's more...
*See also
The ample pictures of both the Visual Studio 2010 GUI and running Silverlight applications augment the many code samples. The section that I have appreciated the most has been the chapter on "Talking to WCF RIA Services" as I am working on developing a better understanding of it.
Now that the summer is here, it's a great time to pick up a book or two to read when you're away from your computer. If you are building or want to build applications with Silverlight, I highly recommend this book and suggest that you get a copy for your summer reading.

Best book for Developers., July 18, 2010
Best book for beginner / intermediate developers who have prior knowledge about basics of Silverlight.

Best Silverlight 4 Book To Date, June 19, 2010
I have read through every well-known Silverlight 4 book on the market. I have even read part of Microsoft Step by Step Silverlight 4 (released yesterday 2010-06-18 on Safari and via ebook) - In my humble opinion, this is the best Silverlight 4 book on the market to date. Most of what I have read from the other Silverlight books is covered in Ian Griffith's Silverlight 4 labs up on the Microsoft Silverlight 4 page. If you want a fast track to learn Silverlight 4 and are already familiar with C# .NET, I would recommend picking up a top rated Silverlight 3 book (I personally like books from the Apress series - "Pro Silverlight 3" and the Silverlight 3 Business Intelligence one (forget the exact title) - then the labs on the official Silverlight 4 website and this book.

life savor, August 25, 2010
I had to write a web-application to demo the WCF Data Service I was writing on a very short time budget. This book was a life savor; it had all the answers I needed for consuming the service and displaying in the datagrid. For server side programming, both Effective REST Services and Essential WCF are great.

The best silverlight book i've seen..., 24 Aug 2010
This is an excellent book, packed with step by step exercises so you learn by doing rather than just having reading a book as thick as a house brick. Personally I would buy this book to learn Silverlight from scratch, while its true you wont learn a great deal about the controls but you WILL learn the most important aspects which are accessing and displaying data.
I've been a software developer for 6 years after University and bought so many IT books, so far, this has been the best and most readable. I enjoyed reading and practicing the examples in it unlike so many 20 inch thick programming beasts that you dread opening because they just send you to sleep!
Dont hesitate, just buy it.
My only gripe about this book is that when I brought it I thought it was a tad expensive at £35... But, worth it though.

Concise and relevant, 11 Aug 2010
This book covers the essentials of Silverlight and WPF with practical examples that you are going to follow when building your real world applications. It explains WPF binding and DataTemplates well, and what interfaces your business layer objects need to implement to notify when changes occur.
The recipies on WCF communication (sockets, WCF, net.tcp) are great and give examples of when you would best use them, and cover the config file changes needed too.
A refreshingly slim book too - lets face it, who wants a 1000+ page book covering everything and the kitchen sink. You want a straight to the point book that covers the essentials you would use at work and touches all the major areas. Highly recommended.

If you want to read more reviews or order my Silverlight 4 Data and services cookbook, head to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or alternatively you can order via the Packt website as well!