This little line on the top of the book sum up the core objective of this book very nicely!

"Eliminate unnecessary code by taking advantage of the MVVM pattern—less code, fewer bugs"

To get the most out of this book, you will need the followings:
. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1
. Rhino Mocks
. .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1
. You must be familiar with C#, NET framework, Silverlight, WPF
. All sample code is in CSharp and XAML
. Download the example code from http://www.packtpub.com/

This book is an advanced book, however, it only has 491 pages but it covers a lot of subjects where each of the subject worthy of many books but the author package it nicely in one book.

This is not an attempt, to sum up, the book but rather I am trying to give you the feel and the extent of what this book is covering.

Not in any particular order, the subjects are Silverlight, WPF, MVVM, MVC, .NET Events, MVVM light framework, Entity Framework, Persistence Ignorant Presentation Layer, Inversion of Control framework, Workflow, Enterprise library validation application block, usage of non-MVVM based controls in your MVVM based design, Application Performance, Testability code and more.

This book discusses various patterns and shows pros and cons of each pattern and which is the best pattern to use and get the job done efficiently.

This book focuses on testable application, use patterns and framework to have less code, less bug.

Please keep an eye on the "tips" section where it gives you info and link for further reading on a particular subject in each chapter.

Last but not least, here is the direct link to the book: http://www.packtpub.com/mvvm-survival-guide-for-enterprise-architectures...