I just received my copy of the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook, co-authored by fellow Microsoft Regional Director, Gill Cleeren, and at first glance I like what I see. I’ve always been a fan of the “cookbook” approach to technical books because they are problem/solution oriented. Often developers need solutions to solve specific questions like “how do I send email from within my .NET application” and so on, and yes, that was a blatant plug to my article explaining how to accomplish just that, but I digress. :-) I also enjoy the cookbook approach because you can just start flipping pages and randomly stop somewhere and see what nugget of information is staring up at you from the page.

Anyway, what I like about this book is that it focuses on a specific area of Silverlight development, accessing data and services.  The book is broken down into the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Learning the Nuts and Bolts of Silverlight 4
Chapter 2: An Introduction to Data Binding
Chapter 3: Advanced Data Binding
Chapter 4: The Data Grid
Chapter 5: The DataForm
Chapter 6: Talking to Services
Chapter 7: Talking to WCF and ASMX Services
Chapter 8: Talking to REST and WCF Data Services
Chapter 9: Talking to WCF RIA Services
Chapter 10: Converting Your Existing Applications to Use Silverlight

As you can see this book is all about working with Silverlight 4 and data. I’m looking forward to taking a closer look at it.

Have a day. :-|