Authors: Dino and Francesco Esposito
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Audience: Beginners to Windows 8 who have some web development experience
Reviewer: Ian Elliot
Chapter 1 details how to download and use Visual Studio 2012 Express. The example might be a bit too advanced for the beginner and if you don't follow don't worry; skip to the next chapters.
Chapter 6 seems to be about the UI, but it ranges over general topics such as project structure and the manifest. As before, the ideas are introduced via large examples rather than short code extracts.
Chapter 7 moves on to using multimedia, but in fact it is mostly about navigation and multipage design. The example that explains how to work with video is a video clip gallery using the SemanticZoom component.
From this point on the book gets more advanced. In Chapter 9 the subject of working with the Windows 8 system is considered - mostly contracts. Chapter 10 is on persisting data; Chapter 11 deals with remote data; and Chapter 12 is about devices and sensors including GPS, webcam and printers.
The penultimate chapter is about live tiles. which again is a topic I would have expected to be covered earlier as it is a core WinRT app feature. The final chapter is on getting your app into the Windows Store.
If you like having ideas introduced using examples then this might be the book for you. However, if you prefer principles of operation followed up with an example then perhaps not. The book never goes off the beaten track of the documentation, but it does provide a reasonable introduction to that documentation. It is also far from complete and there are large parts of the Win.JS library not explored.