I found this book to be a very good introduction to learning Expression Blend 3. I am no longer intimidated by the Blend interface, which is much more than I can say about many of my peers! (I am a software engineer and have been developing with .NET since it's first beta release in 2001, but have never been very good at user design/experience.) This book has given me the confidence to build new applications without the drab, gray, boxy-look of traditional Windows applications. I loved the hands-on approach to learning that this book offers so you aren't spending all of your time reading about every property that every control has - instead, you are using them and seeing how they work in a live application. The book was easy to read and easy to follow.
I have also had some discussions with the author, Victor Gaudioso, who I found to be very responsive to my questions. He has added me to his email update list so that I get notified of new, instructional videos that he puts together for Blend 3, which I have found quite helpful.
With that being said, here are the things I would have liked to seen changed or added:
1. I did not like the fact that all of the pictures were black/gray/white. Many of the gradient effects for buttons and such were hard to distinguish when printed this way. I know that printing in color significantly increases the cost of printing, but maybe there could be a way to see the color images online so we can compare what they truly look like to what we are doing in our own design.
2. I think the MVVM example/discussion should have come at the end of the book, or maybe as an Appendix. It is a much more advanced topic than the ones leading up to it and it takes quite a bit of studying, even for a developer since I have no experience in MVP or MVVM, in order to digest it. It seemed out of place where it was.
3. I also would have liked to seen some examples using/explaining Behaviors in comparison with Event Handlers so that we could compare the 2 approaches to designing applications. If there is true separation between the designer and the developer, the designer would be more likely to use Behaviors to implement their effects than Event Handlers.
4. I also agree with another reviewer that there could have been more on using timed animations in an application using the timeline. While there was more than adequate coverage on using the Visual State Manager, there wasn't much on true animation sequences. Victor did create a couple of new videos in response to this request, which have helped.
So overall, it did fill its promise as a "foundation" book. It is one of the best "How to get started in Blend 3" books that I have seen thus far. Now I need to find a book for "the next level" in Blend. Something beyond the "foundations"...
