Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Unleashed Review

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Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Unleashed ReviewI've read all the Blend books I could find. My summaries would be as follows:
Foundation Expression Blend 4 with Silverlight 4 (Friends of Ed): Poor. Printed in black and white. Author seems totally confused about some topics (especially grid layout and coding) and misleads the reader as a result. Unstructured and rambling.
Blend 4 Step by Step (Microsoft Press): Not a bad set of tutorials but can be frustrating when things don't work as advised. Good intro tutorials but not much else and leaves out too much key information.
Pro Blend 4 (Apress): The second best book available. However after the same author's seminal "Pro C#" book I was disappointed at how thin this book was, and feel it should have been issued under the "Beginning" series instead. It is printed in full colour but suffers from being written by a hard core developer who doesn't seem to have "got" some of the key points or understood what's important about design. Too often there's an excuse that something is "beyond the scope of this book" when really it shouldn't be. However it's well worth reading and makes a nice companion to the "best" book....
which brings me to this one. Blend 4 Unleashed. Why is it the best?
The author seems to have written this book as if it were a classroom course, and fine-tuned it based on student feedback. The examples work, but more importantly he answers questions the other books ignore as they're working through things (eg "Why is the square peg next to a property orange or green or yellow?", "What can I do with the grid just using those funny icons, or moving the mouse close to them?" etc). More importantly where other books just say "Do this" and then give no explanation at all of why something works the way it does, the author here is at pains to explain why results might not be what you would expect them to be. He understands the layout system in the way the other authors don't and is at great pains to get you to understand it too. The book is also printed in full colour and unlike the other books I never once hit an example where the instructions just didn't work. It was tempting to bypass the introductory chapter thinking I knew all I needed to know after reading the other books mentioned above, but the author taught me some new tricks which none of the other books had mentioned. I felt I was in the hands of an expert who'd planned his book out very carefully to try and get me "started right" rather than just "started".
My only two criticisms would be that (1) the proof-reading is rather poor (I know how this happens - the editors tell technical reviewers not to correct typos as they have staff to do that and are only interested in being informed about technical errors, but in-house publishing staff just do a terrible job of proof-reading). Thankfully these proof-reading errors are just annoying spellings, typo's and grammatical errors and there are no problems where it really matters - with the instructions and XAML listings. (2) I would have loved for the book to be twice as long. But these are minor quibbles. If you can only afford one Blend book this is definitely the one to get.Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Unleashed Overview

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