This book is organized in 17 chapters, all with excellent full-color content inside.
Even though chapters are not grouped, we could identify 3 main areas of content. The first and most rich of the areas included chapter 1 "Introducing Silverlight," Chapter 6 "The Application Model," and Chapter 12 "Browser Integration" in which Silverlight's overall goals and design is revealed. These chapters also explore how an application is deployed and hosted in browser environment insulated from cross-platform issues, allowing you to interact with HTML and Javascript, also integrating with existing content.

The second area is about building interactive user interfaces and span on Chapter 2 "XAML" which is a detailed introduction to this language. Though it was first created for WPF and then reused in Silverlight, there are several differences to be aware of. All these difference are always pointed and explained along all chapters related to how to build user interface, like chapter 3 "Layout," chapter 5 "Elements," and 11 "Styles Templates and Custom Controls" in which also all the steps involved in custom control creation are explained.

The third area of content is about .net framework features which are incredibly available in Silverlight 2, even though they have several, but always well highlighted, differences. These features are described in chapter 13 "ASP.NET and web services," chapter 15 "Isolated Storage," Chapter16 "Multithreading," and chapter 17 "Networking." As stated in the chapter titles, all these topics are well known powerful features of .net framework, use writing a language that many developers are accustomed to, C#, and all this abundance is designed to run cross-platform.

First of all, the book is for developers, not for designers. It is written by a 360 degree expert, who also wrote books on ASP.NET and WPF. The author, from a developer's perspective, eliminates doubts as they arise from complex related topics. For those who are also interested on WPF, you are always warned where and when thing work differently in Silverlight, with precious and ubiquitous "WPF VS Silverlight" inserts. Each topic is deeply explored and well explained, often revealing internals of Silverlight's client and host ecosystem. The good thing is also that these practices are cross-browser and cross-platform; this means the power to target more users with your application. If such a target is in your plans, this is a must have for your bookshelf and a great companion for its big brother book on WPF.