Sams Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours

I chose this book because it has coding examples which, mainly, work. However, important concepts (like DataContext) are glossed over; the goal seems to be developing WPF applications without understanding many of the underlying concepts. In many cases, the book gives you several pages of code to enter, with either no discussion or a minimal discussion of the what-how-and-why of it. One in particular messed me up, and that was trying to figure out how a declared event got subscribed to - and then, in the next chapter, I found that an ObservableCollection was being used, and the correct interfacing had already been set up - but there was no discussion by way of prelude about this in the book, so I went off on a wild goose chase for about 30 minutes, climbing around in Visual Studio Help, until I found the relationship between the ObservableCollection list and the event in question - and THEN I found out that the book example was set up correctly, but I couldn't TELL that it was set up correctly - I thought there was a mistake because here was an event with no subscriber.The examples are in C#, which works for me because that is what I code in, and was the main reason for my chosing this book. But, in one or two cases, important code-behind program elements are left out of the examples - like namespace "using"s. I could figure out what they had to be, but only because I was already experienced in C#. You therefore should really have at least an intermediate level of skill in C# before purchasing this book. If you code in any other language, well, good luck with that.Use this book to get started, but order your second WPF book before finishing this one. Several other users have posted books they've used, but no two of them have posted the same one, so use your own judgement. Borrowing a colleague's book for a dry run might be worthwhile.

Yes, even though it's March 2012, and the book is a few years old and doesn't cover some of the new features of WPF (datagrid, for example), it is still extremely useful. It covers a large range of topics, from beginner to advanced. It gives you three different example programs to code (just copy code from the book) that give you quite a bit of practice, which I find as the most effective way to learn some pretty complicated stuff. Even though you just have to pretty much copy the code, it's still easy to make mistakes. Finding my mistakes actually helped me learn (and to become a better typist:). There are also several instances where there is some pretty advanced C# code-behind. So, if you're a beginner programmer, be prepared to be challenged in this area, too. Also, be aware that some of the programming examples are designed to teach WPF, and don't use the best code-behind programming (such as the lack of storing data in a database or using serialization).As a note to the authors or potential new authors, it would be awesome to update and expand this book for WPF 4.5 or maybe wait for WPF 5. Also, as I'm a better VB programmer than C# programmer (as are many people), I have to wonder why nobody writes this kind of book for WPF using VB. Why?

I've been programming for many years and I've gotten started with several other languages using other Sam's "teach yourself" books. I was very disappointed with this one though -- at best it is just an introduction to WPF.The book is organized around several example applications rather than being organized around WPF concepts and using examples to illustrate the material being taught. The example source code is not commented, so with no background in WPF I found it nearly impossible to understand most of what I was typing. The explanatory text, for me anyway, was not adequate to understand everything going on in the example.Since it's organized around the example applications the book is not really useful as a reference either, as are some of the other "teach yourself" books. Different concepts and techniques are covered "a little here, a little there" through the various examples, and each example builds as it goes so I found it difficult to follow any individual section without starting from the beginning of an example.The book mentions that there are various ways to do various things, but does not really explain what they might be, nor why the method used in the example was selected.After spending a couple months working through this book I now know what can be done with WPF and I understand basically how it's structured, but (speaking for myself) I'm still not able to develop any sort of useful application with it. As far as I'm concerned this book has no business being titled Teach Yourself anything in 24 Hours.

I was brand new to WPF when I got that book. Just like other "Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" books, I think it did a great job introducing me to the subject.The book follows three complete projects that are more than just the simple Hello World- 2 of them (a simple word processing application, and a simple media viewer) could actually be a starting point for some real-world applications. The examples and explanations are very easy to follow and understand and I was ready to start working on my own WPF project after completing this book.A caveat about the examples- this book is focusing only on the user interface (obviously), so the examples are given only after someone have already applied other important OOP thinking into them before presenting them to the reader. This book on it's own won't help you learn how to build a Windows application well, and if you are new to the whole field, you should couple this book with other books about Object Oriented programming, Dependency Injection, refactoring, etc.

Decent introduction into WPF. Certainly not 24 hours - much longer. In the middle portion they introduce a rather long (several chapters) clever example that I feel doesn't serve the rest of the book very well. This part of the book jumps head first into a sophisticated design pattern example that really obfuscates the WPF concepts that you need to learn. The book is still really an introduction to WPF and should be complemented with a more advanced book afterwards.

As an intro to WPF I bought myself some books (WPF 24 hours, Essential WPF, WPF Unleashed). The latter two are great books giving lots of in-depth information on WPF how to. WPF in 24 hours takes a different approach with the focus being on developing a WPF application. It does this very well with a light introduction to the Model View Presenter pattern. This sets you off on the right tracks on how to structure a WPF application.The other books I've mentioned above go into a lot more technical detail on WPF and are also essential reading but WPF is vast and it is often difficult to see the wood for the trees. I'll go back to those books later and I'm sure they will ultimately become my standard references, but during the getting started phase I couldn't have wished for a better book than WPF in 24 hours.

I have to admit I love the sams 24 hour books, to the extent I even have a professional paranoia about them stopping making them.This book is like the others, it gives you an excellent understanding of the topic in 24 relatively easy lessons, and by the end you will be a very capable WPF programmer. You'll need to brush up on MVVM but that's just a few online tutorials (it's just a pattern afterall).Critics point out this book has a lot less pages that other WPF books and doesn't go as deep as a reference book. The point is, this book will get you very good a lot quicker than any other book and your understanding of the fundamentals of WPF (and it's differences from WinForms) will be excellent. What's the point of buying a 1100 page textbook if it's in a format that doesn't teach you anything?

As someone who has been programming for over twenty years professionally I found this book to be an excellent way to approach WPF.As everyone mentions WPF is a steep learning curve and what this book does is to take you up that curve holding your hand all the way - by going through a number of projects explaining them along the way.Don't be tempted to just read the book - do the exercises and projects and you will benefit enormously.Most of the other WPF books are reference books - where this book excels is in the area of training you how to code with WPF by explaining things along the way.This book also does a very good job at explaining the MVP pattern which it uses within projects in the book.

I have always been a bit suspicious about learning something complicated in 24 hours, however this book gives a pretty good introduction to WPF. Throughout the book a few usable applications are build to demonstrate concepts. But most importantly, the book explains how the features of WPF effects how backend logic can (and should) be designed, especially with focus on the MVP (model-view-presenter) pattern. This is valuable information that should be known by anyone who wants to use WPF to make their frontend shine.