Introduction

Adam Nathan is a well known book author, whose publications include WPF Unleashed and ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code. He works at Microsoft as a Software Design Engineer and he's a long time blogger. He's the former inventor of Popfly and this book, Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, is his latest creation.

This book is part of the Sams Unleashed series, by now widely recognized for the innovative, colorful graphics and ease of reading. The topics covered in the book are all about Silverlight 1.0, the first release of the Microsoft Web engine for animations and vector graphics.

What the book is about

The book is organized into three main sections, which cover in an incremental fashion from the basics to the more advanced features of Silverlight 1.0.

The first section gives an introduction to the framework and provides a detailed guide about the basics of the XAML markup language used by Silverlight to render contents and explains the different ways to embed a Silverlight control into a web page. The author doesn't restrain from acknowledging the limits of writing JavaScript code to interact with Silverlight objects but overcomes this limit with his passion in talking about each topic and skills in explaining things in a very affordable manner.

After introducing the basics of working with Silverlight controls the second section moves on with graphics, static graphics. Full of amazingly formatted code, Adam shows how to create figures with XAML, acknowledging that using tools like Microsoft Expression Blend would ease such tasks a lot, but keeping an eye on the fact that knowing how to create things manually is the way to go for professional developers who want to work with Silverlight, just like professional Web developers need to know HTML even though they use design tools to make their job easier. While reading the section one might think that such basic tasks like creating lines, writing text and other static graphics is a bit disappointing since Silverlight has come to light as a competitor to Macromedia Flash, but once introduced to topics like video brushes and transforms everything looks a lot more promising and Silverlight shows its real potential.

After the static contents, explained in the second section, come the live contents, tackled in the third section. Although all programming is done by hand and the only language supported for interacting with Silverlight components is JavaScript, the opening chapter introduces a very interesting topic such the ability to download contents on demand, via a downloader component which is also capable of extracting resources from compressed files, something other Web frameworks definitely lack.

The following chapter then discusses one of the most interesting features of Silverlight, animations. There's a lot to say about this topic, and a lot to experiment; Adam makes tons of examples, which make animation behaviors, storyboards and other features otherwise hard to understand in theory just a breeze.

The book then concludes with a chapter about multimedia contents, where the author explains what Silverlight has to offer when it comes to distributing audio and video, a vast topic with a great potential in distribution of multimedia contents.

Summary

The book is a must read for everyone interested in learning Silverlight 1.0, and although the bigger 2.0 brother is already behind the corner, grasping the basics of the framework is certainly a great starting point. Furthermore, reading Adam's work is a pleasure due to his uncommon skill in explaining everything as easy as he's not talking about programming.

I find the layout and coloring of the book simply great, and I think that reading code exactly like it's shown in development environments makes it a lot easier to understand. The layout of the book is innovative and functional, with many side notes which delve into interesting side topics. Five stars out of five.

About Simone Busoli

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