Braulio Diez, a friend of mine I known during the TechED 2008 in Barcelona, together with other authors has recently written a book about Silverlight 5. The "Mastering LOB Development for Silverlight 5: A Case Study in Action", published by PackLib is an interesting book that is able to point the light on the Silverlight topic, mixing together a good scan about Silverlight 5.0 features and a number of "cases study" that focus the attention of the reader on the power of this, still unmatched and irreplaceable, piece of technology.

In a time that seems to be pointed to the most new evolutions, inside the new version of Windows, mostly directly derived from Silverlight, reading this book may be a useful exercise to understand what it can do and what someone can still do using XAML instead of HTML5.

My thanks to Braulio for the pleasant reading.

http://www.packtpub.com/mastering-lob-development-silverlight-5/book

Some time ago I've received a copy of the book "Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook" and finally I was able to read it during my recent holidays. So I decided to write this brief review to suggest you to give it a chance, because I found this book is really interesting for someone need to start learning Silverlight 4.0.

The book is a sort of collection of recipes, that describes some use cases of Silverlight applications that give a good framing for various aspect of this technology. 

The ten chapters cover all the basic arguments someone may need to start writing applications, from the first project and the use of Blend, to more advanced topics like databinding, the data controls and the usage of WCF Service and Ria services.

I think the people usually ask me about good books to start from, may found this cookbook useful for this purpose.