To truly appreciate The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst, you should probably be a designer – someone who can speak the language of aesthetics and art and feeling, etc. A writer might also appreciate the book, particularly for its many tips on using typography properly on the printed page. Since I am neither designer nor writer, I’m not exactly the book’s primary audience, and thus didn’t end up enjoying it as much as I had hoped.

Even so, I made it through half the book before I began to skim. The author is clearly a man who is madly in love with typography and its impact on the written word. A left-brained brute like me can, to a degree, enjoy a well-styled page of prose. Hopefully, reading this book will have helped me recognize some of the key features of good typography. Like so many critics, I know what I don’t like, so I’m glad that there are people who can use the principles in this book to create designs that I don’t “don’t like”.

Update: Be sure to read Eli's comment, which eloquently explains how I managed to read the first half of the book. :-)

XAML in a Nutshell, by Lori A. MacVittie, is a “Desktop Quick Reference” for XAML, the XML language used by Windows Presentation Foundation. As such, it has minimal explanatory content, consisting primarily of short paragraphs documenting each of the elements and attributes supported by XAML.

The biggest problem with this book is that it is too early for a XAML reference book. The API has changed significantly since the book was written, though it was only released last month. Worse yet, I could find no significant errata or book updates on the Web, leaving me to regularly question the accuracy of the book as I read.

Neither was I impressed by the organization of the book, nor the formatting of the reference items, nor the infrequent and/or unnecessary and/or poorly documented screenshots, nor the lack of online sample code, nor the errors in the text, nor the missing topics (like namespace mapping), nor the lack of information about WPF, the core technology behind XAML.

In short, I cannot recommend this book. You’ll do much better with a copy of Programming Windows Presentation Foundation, the sample code and change notes on that book’s Web site, and the documentation that ships with the WPF beta.