Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure of tech reviewing some awesome books by my fellow colleagues. 

Brian Peek co-authored "Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More".  Brian is well known for writing WiimoteLib, a fully managed .NET Library which allows anyone with .NET experience to integrate the Nintendo Wiimote into their applications.  There are two chapters in the book that use this library to create some fascinating projects.  One of them is a Wiimote controlled car, and the other is a Wiimote Whiteboard (video: Wiimote Whiteboard ).  By reading these chapters, you'll learn how to recreate those projects and will be given the necessary tools to do some amazing things with the Wiimote.  There are also a couple of chapters on game creation that I really enjoyed.  One of them teaches you how to create a game using the XNA framework that will run on the PC, Xbox 360, and the Zune.  The other is a Lego game created using Popfly, a Silverlight based game creator.  There's definitely a ton of cool stuff to learn from this book, and it's coming out really soon (November 15th).   Be sure to check it out.  You can pre-order it on Amazon.

For those looking to build business applications using the Silverlight 2, you should check out the upcoming book "Data Services with Silverlight 2" by John Papa.  John has done many presentations VS Live and frequently writes articles for MSDN magazine.  He also likes the Yankees, which is a plus in my book :)  The book is definitely geared towards the intermediate to advanced developer.  The first few chapters start off by teaching you the basics of Silverlight and data-binding. Afterwards you'll learn how to use Silverlight to communicate via WCF and consume REST services  via WebClient.  I especially like the last few chapters which put the knowledge you've learned to use in building full applications.  One of them is a Twitter client, and the other is a storefront that communicates with Amazon and their shopping cart system.  Speaking of Amazon, you pre-order this book here which comes out in December.

I definitely recommend both of these books depending on if you're looking to do some fun projects or if you're trying to build business applications in Silverlight. Check em out!