In between my day-to-day programming, I’ve been trying to teach myself WPF. And what a paradigm shift it’s been! I’m still somewhat mystified by a lot of what the technology has to offer, but I’m getting more comfortable with it every day. I picked up several books which have been invaluable in learning the platform.
First, is Chris Anderson’s Essential Windows Presentation Foundation
. Chris was one of the architects of the WPF platform, so who better to give a comprehensive overview of the technology? This book is great at bringing you up to speed, especially if you’re a WinForms developer like me. At just under 450 pages, it’s a fairly quick read as tech books go, and does a really good job at explaining the basic controls that go into making up a WPF app.
Next, I read through Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed
by Adam Nathan. The best part about this book is its full color illustrations. For a media-rich platform like WPF, I can’t emphasize enough how beneficial that is. I felt that Nathan went into a bit more detail, and that this book complemented Anderson’s book very well. I would recommend reading this one after Essential Windows Presentation Foundation because I felt the basics were covered in a bit more detail by that book.
I’m currently reading Charles Petzold’s Applications = Code + Markup
. This is the heftiest of the three (almost 1000 pages), and takes a different approach to teaching WPF. While the other books focus pretty heavily on using XAML markup to create applications, Petzold devotes the entire first half of his book to using only C# to create apps. I originally started with this book first, but soon after postponed my reading in favor of the first two books I mentioned above. Now that I’ve got a bit better grasp on the technology, I’m finding the explanations in Petzold’s book much easier to follow. The first two books get you accustomed to the technology on a general level, but this book digs a little deeper and explains the why and how behind a lot of the techniques introduced.
