(book cover might change before publication)
As I am reaching the end of the writing phase of Silverlight 4 Unleashed (to be published at Sams), I thought I would give a little more information about this book.
The book’s idea
Because I didn’t want to merely write an update to the existing Silverlight 2 Unleashed, I proposed a different approach to my editor: Using Silverlight 2 Unleashed (which was bringing people up to speed with Silverlight 2 pretty much from scratch) as the basis for the new book, and building on the foundation. The thing is, much of the material from Silverlight 2 Unleashed is still valid in Silverlight 4. There are very few differences and of course all the new features that were added in SL3 and SL4, but let’s face it, I don’t have much new to write about XAML, the basic transforms, animations etc.
We decided to make the PDF of selected chapters of Silverlight 2 Unleashed available to the buyers of Silverlight 4 Unleashed. This way, developers who never touched Silverlight will be able to bring themselves up to speed, and then to dive into advanced material with the new book. We still need to work out the exact details, more about this later. I think this is an innovative and attractive initiative, and I am very grateful that Sams accepted to do this.
With that, it means that Silverlight 4 Unleashed will be 700+ pages packed with brand new material. Some of the features I describe were already available in Silverlight 3, but you will need them for Silverlight 4 (and since we didn’t do a Silverlight 3 version of the book, they needed to be mentioned). I think I did a good job in covering most of the features that Silverlight 4 has.
Just like my first book, this new book is chock-packed with code samples (everything will be available on my website, of course) and pictures. We are also renewing the Silverlight 2 Unleashed experience by publishing the new book in full color. I am very happy about this again (and let’s be honest, this is a lot of work for me as an author and for the editor too to do a book in color), and I think the added value is pretty obvious.
The topics
A full table of content is available as PDF. There are 22 chapters as shown below.
Caveat: This is a raw TOC. Some chapters (title and content) will change during the edit process. Early chapters were written against Silverlight 4 beta, so some names will change before publication.
Introduction
- Three years of Silverlight
- Setting up and discovering your environment
- Extending your application with controls
- Investigating existing controls
- Understanding dependency properties
- Grouping, sorting and binding
- Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel pattern
- Using data controls
- Connecting to the web
- Creating resources, styles and templates
- Deep diving into Blend
- Sketching user experience
- Creating line of business applications
- Enhancing line of business applications
- Developing navigation application and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7
- Using effects and recording media
- Extending the experience
- Extending the experience some more
- Extending the experience (again)
- Building extensible and maintainable applications
- Optimizing the performance
- Using advanced development techniques
Conclusion
When will it be available?
I often get asked when the book will be available. My answer has been: After the summer. We didn’t decide the exact date of publication yet, but rest assured that both Sams and I are doing all we can to have this book out to you guys as soon as possible, and with the highest possible quality.
For more info about the book’s progress, follow me on Twitter and stay tuned to this blog!
Happy coding,
Laurent
Print | posted on Monday, June 28, 2010 3:07 AM