I got this book because I found Expression Blend to be virtually impossible to figure out on my own. I'm a coder not a designer, so I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I think I could figure out what about 25% of the various tools were supposed to do. I needed a book to start with (the online tutorials from Microsoft were nice but too hard to follow) and I needed a book whose author started out assuming that the reader was a complete newby. When I saw that the author of this book had done two previous versions of the book for two previous versions of Blend I was hopeful that this would do the trick. The word "Foundation" in the title suggested strongly that here was a book that very basic. And the upshot of it all was, YES! The book assumes you know very little about the subject and takes you on a hand-held guided tour of the product. Victor Gaudioso makes sure you have an opportunity to work with pretty much every important tool in Blend.
About 50 or 60 pages into it, I got confused about something very important, and wasn't sure what to do about it. I thought I recalled seeing the author's email address in the introductory material, so I checked and yes there it was. I sent an email complaining about what I thought was a problem with the book, or maybe my Blend installation. Assuming that here must be a "famous author" with no time for the common man, I wasn't sure what to expect, but dang if he didn't respond within an hour or so and offer to help me out! He even offered to give me a call to help clear up any misunderstandings I might have. Well, I took him up on it and we had a very pleasant chat about Silverlight, Blend, and so on. I wasn't the only one impressed by this eagerness to assist a reader: when I told my coworkers about it they were amazed, too. And my problem was not the book, or Blend, but me of course.
I recommend this book highly to anyone who needs to learn how to build Silverlight applications in Expression Blend -- especially you design-challenged developers out there!