Caveat Emptor

Ok, here's the deal I'm an experienced ASP, office, sql, IIS, exchange developer, digital dashboard. I've been tasked to customize and deploy sharepoint for a fairly large organization. Naturally I felt I needed a book to serve as a guide for the more exotic requirements. Of course I turned to Microsoft. BIG MISTAKE.

This book is long on theory, short on details. Its more of an idea book then a resource kit. Its not for a beginner, because the only thing it goes into any detail is installation. Which means nothing because installation is run by a wizard. So as long as you meet hardware/software specs its a breeze.

There is nothing about even basic customization of the dashboard (which is almost 70% of what an organization will ask for).

Its not for an advanced person, because anyone who has even deployed sharepoint once, or at least worked with a document management tool will be able to work out the theories. What I was looking for was how to implement those theories through sharepoint!

You know it may only satisfy a marketing guy who needed to know in a jiffy what Sharepoint can do, but has no intention of doing it himself.

What you buy is a giant table of contents to the MSDN. There are many chapters that are 4-5 pages long that whet your appetite and then refer to so and so at microsoft.com for details.

I have never seen a book with such terrible code samples. They are pretty lame (basically "hello world" type stuff) and there are NO explanations. Basically "type this, install, and press run". I dont even know why what I typed is useful.

I gave a two stars because the CD came with some neat stuff (mostly better implementations of the web parts installed by default). You can rip these apart to use as templates for your own code, but man your going to have to figure out EVERYTHING by yourself.

So if you really want to learn sharepoint go to MSDN and save your money.

Other Reviews

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• Caveat Emptor