WPF 4.5 Unleashed

This book is a prime example of how a WPF book should be written. The author not only presents many topics in an encyclopedic fashion, but also gives details for the "whys." Also, the diagrams in the book are phenomenal in helping to illustrate the examples and descriptions presented in the text. The book has both a lot of breadth and a lot of depth as well. One can choose to read this book "superficially," ignoring the details. However, for those of us who are interested in the whys as well as the hows, this book presents much more depth than I would expect from a WPF (or any software development) book. As for the rating, I give the content 6 out of 5 stars. On the other hand, I give the publisher (Sams) 2 out of 5 stars. The reason for this is that the pages are ridiculously thin, so you get bleed-through between the two sides of a page, especially in the many densely colored regions that are present in the illustrations in this book. Also, the CMY color plates that are used to add color to the book were often off, resulting in imprecise positioning of colors which is especially noticeable on thin lines and colored text. On top of all of this, two physical pages in my particular book had slight creases in the paper, which resulted in significant misprints on those pages. Fortunately, the resultant printed pages were still legible, so I did not bother to return the book to Amazon or the publisher for a replacement. In all, because of the quality of the actual content, I do not want to subtract a star or two from the book's rating. However, I think that Sams _really_ needs to do a much better job of printing color books such as this one. Skimping on paper thickness and not aligning the color plates properly is reminiscent of printing errors from the early 80s, not late 2013.

This book will not teach you how to write desktop applications. Rather, it assumes you already have experience doing so, but want to learn how to do it with WPF. For example, it will tell you all sorts of interesting things about using a ListView control in WPF, but doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what it is or why you'd want to use it vs. other options. There's a general bottom-up mentality that pervades the structure of the book. For example, there's a chapter for "Content Controls", followed by a chapter for "Items Controls". The chapter titles and their contents come from the base classes that the controls inherit from. Whereas other books might organize things by complexity or purpose, WPF Unleashed organizes them by class hierarchy. Sometimes useful information is hard to find. For example, if you want to know how to create a modal dialog, you'd probably look up "modal dialog" in the index. This would take you to a section on popping up Win32 or WinForms dialogs from within a WPF application. The actual discussion of modal dialogs is in a small sub-section entitled, "Custom Dialogs". Fortunately these occurrences are rare. On the plus side, the book covers a tremendous amount of ground, and does a pretty good job of explaining some very complicated topics. (Properties, dependency properties, attached properties, attached property providers, property triggers, property wrappers, property paths, ...) The paperback version is printed in full color, on relatively thin paper. On pages with heavy color areas, like the start of each chapter, the paper tends to curl. Not really a problem, just odd.

Probably the most important thing you and I look for in these reviews is "Who is this book written for?". The answer here is someone who already knows a good deal of C# programming that wants to become an expert at WPF. If you want a start-from-zero book on how to create user interfaces this is not it. But if you know C# and you want to learn WPF in the context of how it interacts with C code as well as with hardware, this is the book for you. The more you know about programming in general, the more this book will help you. It's hard to quantify what is meant by "expert" and "the more you know . . . " but if you don't know what inheritance is or what "instanciate" means, you might not get as much out of it. If you know C# and you want to get about as deep into WPF as you can go, this book will take you there. The first three chapters set the stage by giving extensive details on the background, philosophy and operation of WPF. There is even some history thrown in, and the author is in a position to know it! I read those three but started on Chapt 4 where the WPF building really begins. I can give you some advice as to the path to follow if you're not already a C# expert. I certainly wasn't when I was searching for a book like this but I was a competent programmer. I started with John Sharp's excellent book "Visual C# 2010", beginning on p. 443 he takes you through your first WPF interface in great detail for about 100 pages. After I finished his tutorial, I had no trouble going to "WPF 4.5 Unleashed" and starting on Chapt 4 where Mr. Nathan begins getting into WPF deeply. Between the two I learned a lot of both interface and programming skills. I would not have been able to just jump into "Unleashed" because I didn't quite have the programming skills. You might be in better or worse shape to start. From what I now know about WPF, there isn't much that it can do that this book doesn't at least touch on. It was a great teaching tool for me and serves now as a reference book when I need to try something advanced. The writing is succinct and clear. The color graphics and type are VERY helpful and greatly aids following along on your computer, particularly if you Visual Studio. It's a very good book and I'm glad I bought it.

I was a little worried that this text would fly right over my head but was pleasantly surprised. It is easy to read and understand, has just the right amount of history and back story for each chapter and the material is presented in a useful and logical order. If you have at least a moderate knowledge of WinForms and Visual studio the lessons will be easy to understand and do a excellent job of highlighting the differences, advantages and limitations of WPF. Also, there is plenty of depth for experts who are looking for a decent reference. I purchased the Kindle version thinking if I liked the book I'd get a hard copy. The Kindle version, when viewed using the cloud reader, is near perfectly formatted and is in full color, a nice improvement over previous Kindle programming books I've experienced.

The author is very knowledgeable and the first half is very informative but from there it seems to focus a lot on graphics. It needs a follow up book based around MVVM and business applications which I would assume would be the focus of most WPF users.

Great book to start getting your head around WPF. The topics go over everything in great detail and give you an insightful overview of everything you need to know to start making applications. I quickly found reading the book page for page was not really helping me understand the concepts. Reading/Practising in Visual Studio and some google quickly helped me get upto speed on the more complicated concepts such as Data Binding/Dependency Properties. I really have to reiterate that this book is not for C# beginners, it is expected you understand the C# syntax quite well, If you do not understand inheritance, polymorphism, Interfaces or know your way around Visual Studio/WinForms then I suggest this book is NOT for you. The book has a great section on how to take advantage of the latest Windows 7 features and being in color really helps, especially with the XAML syntax.

good book covering many aspects but would have liked more examples. Love the colouring, helps greatly and makes reading appealing.

I've been teaching WPF from a high-level overview perspective for a number of years, usually in classes that are focused on some other technology with WPF as the "easy" UI. I sought out a book like this when I found out I was teaching a custom WPF class to a group of experienced C# developers, and... Wow! The author is fantastic at explaining the "why" of WPF that I never understood, including the differences/similarities between XAML and C#, and the rationale for why certain controls work (or don't work) the way they do. I would recommend this book to anyone who's experienced in the C# language wanting a practical, real-world book that could get them started to creating a production WPF application. Though there's something too much low-level detail, even that is easy to spot, as the author places this into his clearly highlighted "Digging Deeper" sections. If you've gotten enough material on the subject already, it's incredibly easy to skip those sections and move on to another topic. All in all, the best WPF book I've read to date. OK, it's the only one. But still.

I recently got into Windows desktop programming using c# and WPF. Coming from C++ and QT background, I did not really know .NET and WPF at all. Both technologies are quite complex and introduce a few concepts (like the MVVM model and XAML), so the learning curve is quite steep for any newbie. This is where the book really shines. I think it is easily one of the best coding books I have ever read. It is noticeable that the author really knows his stuff and can draw from a lot of experience. Also, he has structured the book in a logical way, i.e. introducing the core concepts behind WPF before diving into the API and the coding. This is crucial as you will make critical mistakes if you start coding before you understand the architecture well enough (I learned the hard way ;). Also notheworthy are the "Digging Deeper", "Warning" and "Tip" textboxes throughout the book. They provide in-depth information about a topic, warn about common pitfalls or provide general tips and best practice advice for using a certain piece of technology. By the way: The book is in full color, which makes it great to read (you get the proper syntax highlighting).

I am still only about 80% of the way through this book and it covers a huge amount of ground. I particularly like the way Adam Nathan describes the odd-ball things regarding WPF 4.5 - things that could have been done differently or that don't make a lot of sense. Those are the things which trap beginners and cost them a lot of time if they haven't been warned.

worth for money, core concept discussion and in very easy ways.

Envío en dos días, rapidísimo. El libro es genial. Muy completo. Solo he podido leer los primeros capítulos y ojear el resto. Muy bien explicado y con muchísimos ejemplos.

Ero totalmente un principiante con il WPF e questo libro mi ha spalancato un mondo. Bellissimo e tutto a colori permette di esplorare questo mondo guidandoti nell'apprendimento capitolo per capitolo. Sicuramente consigliatissimo!