Hot off the presses is Bob German and Paul Stubbs SharePoint and Silverlight book. The credibility of these guys is off the map. Bob German has been around in the SharePoint world since the earliest of days. He's a great friend and has huge credibility inside and outside of Microsoft. Highly recommend his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/BobGerman In addition, Paul Stubbs has been at the core of the development evangelism camp. He's done some great things for uniting the SharePoint development community. You can check out his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/pstubbs

As the world is anxious on their bets around Silverlight, this book puts a firm stake in the ground on SharePoint 2010 and says go for it. With client object models and working with RESTful service it becomes a great way of working with SharePoint both in the enterprise space and with Office 365 in the cloud. Really this book could easily say working with data and SharePoint and while the title wouldn't be as catchy it would be really sharing the goodness that's in here. The book isn't exclusively about Silverlight at all. That's my key take away. You could say you'll never use Silverlight and LOVE the heck out of this book. Mastery of the client APIs and cloud APIs could definitely takes a leap forward with this book. If you are looking for hard core examples of doing real development outside the build a server solution box, this is where you should look.

The guys do address the HTML 5 question right at the beginning of the book. The ability to build rich business applications in the browser with Silverlight has a proven and mature track record.

Get it now.

Some of my favorite chapters in the book focus on this huge variety of very important development topics:

• Advanced use of the SharePoint Client Object Model
• Using SharePoint's Javascript API with JQuery
• Using SharePoint's Rest API
• SharePoint Search and Social Networking
• Buliding SharePoint Apps for Windows Phone 7
• Windows Azure and Office 365 Integration

Yeah, They've got a little about Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 as well. (Tongue in cheek, that's sarcasm for the rest of the world…)

• Silverlight field types in SharePoint including geocoding
• Connected Silveright Webparts
• Improving server performance and reducing server traffic by passing serialized .NET objects on the page

You won't be disappointed by the rich examples and scenarios in these chapters and I believe it will lead you to say… I didn't know you could do that with SharePoint!

I just handed the book to my Silverlight skeptical JQuery, REST client side developer guru and shared some of the real insights that the book had, and he said a big… THANKS!!

You can pick up the SharePoint 2010 Development with Silverlight book at your friendly neighborhood Amazon… or get the kindle edition for your kindle, IPad, or the whatever reader you've got.