The folks at Telerik have just announced the availability of their O'Reilly Short Cut dealing with Silverlight 1.1 (at a price point of 9.99 US$). The content gets distributed as an immediate PDF download via the O'Reilly site.

The 76 pages start by introducing Silverlight and the Silverlight framework model followed by a more generic introduction to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) including a brief comparison of various RIA technologies (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flex, AJAX Frameworks, Adobe AIR, JavaFX and Google Gears).

The next chapter is a rundown on Silverlight tools mainly focusing on Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 (which currently is available for free in Beta 2).

The chapter about the Silverlight Design Model briefly introduces Shapes, Brushes, Transformations, Text, Image, Media and Animations.

I found the most valuable part of this Short Cut the next section about the Silverlight 1.1 Development Model which starts by explaining the basics of a Silverlight 1.1 project, covers its object model, touches the event model and also includes a bit about Silverlight and LINQ.

Finally the Short Cut very briefly explains basics about building a Silverlight application with an example for a custom Silverlight Button control.

While we very likely can expect the release of Silverlight 1.1 somewhere in mid 2008 - and thus still a bit to go with Alphas and Betas - we currently see lots of new preliminary content coming up almost daily. Telerik's O'Reilly Short Cut offers nothing which is not already available for free on the Web. In fact Microsoft's community sites currently offer the most valuable learning material and some commercial offerings are catching up.

I'd recommend this Short Cut for offline reading on a flight or journey by train and if you're fully new to Silverlight 1.1 and want to get a comprehensive introduction - but do not expect the Short Cut to really teach you how to build great apps!