Book review: Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development

This review is for the book 'Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development', and has been submitted by a member of the Windows Phone 7 User Group - a user group supported by SilverlightShow.

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A few weeks ago Matt Lacey who runs London’s Windows Phone User Group gave me the opportunity to review the second edition of Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development by Henry Lee and Eugene Chuvyrov. I can earnestly report that this book does exactly what it says on the tin (or cover, if you prefer). If you know little or nothing about Windows Phone 7 Development then this book will get you up to speed as quickly as you can read it.

The book starts off by defining several common terms and concepts in Windows Phone 7 development and points you in the direction of a variety of useful resources before quickly moving on to setting up your IDE and a primer on Microsoft’s excellent Expression Blend studio.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only are Azure cloud services mentioned but they also have an entire chapter devoted to integrating them into your WP7 apps presented in the authors easily digestible step-by-step style. The book is packed with screenshots, code snippets and tips that hand-hold you through nearly every aspect of developing your first
Windows Phone applications.

For those who already have some development experience with Windows Phone 7 you may find that you can skip a number of chapters as they address basic concepts that you will already be familiar with, however, that is not to say that this book will be of no use to you. Beginning Windows Phone 7 Development digs about around the edges of Windows Phone 7 development and, as a result, contains entire chapters devoted to things that less experienced developers may not consider like internationalisation, security and useful tools like Reactive Extensions. My only criticism is that there are a handful of mistakes in the text of the book that may cause some confusion.

If you are new to Windows Phone 7 development and you have some .NET experience then you will not be disappointed by this book at all as you will find everything you need to build, test and submit your apps.  More advanced developers will probably find most of the content fairly straightforward but then again the title should probably have been a clue that this book isn’t targeted at  advanced WP7 developers.