In the last 2 weeks I have read the first 6 chapters of the book “Pro WPF 4.5 in C#” from Matthew MacDonald.
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Click on the book to go to its site in Apress.com |
The experience, reading these chapters was rather satisfactory – the book really starts from the very beginning of WPF and explains the general ideas in an understanding way. The book contains 33 chapters and is more than 1K pages. Due to this, every chapter can be read independently and the book can be used as a source of quick advice.
Furthermore, the examples of the book are really written in a nice way – minimum number of Visual Studio solutions per chapter! In every solution, you may find all the examples, together! An outstanding approach, other authors must “steal” this idea (indeed, I do not like having a separate solution per example, it somehow makes me lazy to open all of them) Another nice thing that I liked is the fact that the source code of the book is made available to everyone, just by adding the ISBN13 number to the URL of the publisher. Then going to the tab “SourceCode/Downloads” and downloading it:
What I liked so far from the examples, were two good ones – one from the 2nd chapter, introducing XAML and making a simple application, answering questions at random with pre-defined answers (something like those old answer balls, which I have seen only in some movies) and one from the 6th chapter (the last one I have read so far) giving good ideas about control usage!
Why I liked these two applications (which I am going to present in vitoshacademy.com later):
A sample code from Chapter 2> It is not something outstanding or requiring much IT Knowledge (anyway it is the 2nd chapter of a 33-chapter book), but it simply shows to a Newbie into WPF (something like me now) what you can achieve with this powerful concept! So, I liked it!
A sample code from Chapter 6> In chapter 6 the application is something like a good summary of the controls. Each control is placed there and explained briefly. To be honest, for every WPF new comer this application can be used as a place for reviews and checks, until he gets into the environment. And last but not least, if this chapter was written by someone else, you would have received 23 solutions with up to 10 lines of code in each! And here you get just one, containing the 23 pieces of code:
This is a good practice, indeed (and when I see something good, I state it!). So, for now this is all. If you want to understand, whether the book is worthy for you, you may first take a look at the examples, available for free online! Their quality (until chapter 6 at least!) is probably the best advertisement of the book!