Recently I finished 2 books about programming with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), "Programming WPF 2nd edition by Chris Sells & Ian Griffiths" and "Essential Windows Presentation Foundation by Chris Anderson". Both books offer a great introduction to programming WPF, but I think "Programming WPF" is the better book.

The first obvious difference is the difference in size between both books, Programming WPF with its 835 pages dwarfs Essential WPF pages with (only) 458 pages. After the foreword, the first chapter of both books gives you a tour of WPF and an introduction on the topics that will be covered in each. Here the difference all ready shows, the additional pages in Programming WPF have not only been used to go into more detail the subjects covered in both, but also covers additional subjects like: 3D and Silverlight (by Shawn Wildermuth).

The thing makes Essential WPF a very interesting book nonetheless, is that because it's written by one of the architects of the WPF team it gives insight in why some choices are made, where Programming WPF is more a book which describes how to do things (often far better than the documentation).

In the end I am very happy I read both books. Initially I wasn't going to read this edition of Programming WPF because I read the first edition and had Essential WPF and the Petzold book in my reading stack. But after reading it, this book is huge addition to the first edition by covering more subjects and updating all code to the final version.

If you are only buying one book about WPF buy Programming WPF; if you are interested in some of the architectural choices you should also buy Essential WPF. Hopefully both books will soon have an updated version which will cover the changes made to WPF in .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1.

Note: a review of "Application = Code + Markup by Charles Petzold" is coming as soon as finish reading it.