Customer Reviews

Bulletproof Installs - A Developer's Guide to Install Programs for Windows

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was an OK book in it's time, but it is now completely out of date. This book covers InstallShield 5, which is not supported on Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP. Both InstallShild 6 and InstallShield Windows Installer Edition are different enought from InstallShield 5 to make this book obsolete.

Overall, the book is good. Better than the IS docs anyhow.

Bear in mind that the book is written for Version 5.1 and below.

InstallShield made a major switch to an event-driven installation and script model in Version 6.1 So a lot of the examples are out of date and need to be converted.

I found this confusing as I was trying to learn and port to the new version at the same time.

I originally purchased this book to help me with a massive project. Most of my installations required installing my device drivers (data acquisition and motion controller drivers), my own software, and third-party applications (computer vision). As a result, the standard documentation wasn't exactly overly helpful.

This was the best book on the market. At the time, it was the ONLY book on the market. Although it offered a nominal amount of help for me, it did give me a fuller understanding to InstallShield and really helped when I needed to build installers for more standard applications.

Considering at the time this book was originally published, the only other avenue to get IS information was to attend a high dollar seminar, it was a great value.

This book comes with a CDROM with InstallShield 5, DemoShield and some other demoware.

I give it 3 stars, not because it isn't a great book, but because Microsoft redefined how installers should work with the operating system (driver signatures, system directory protection, etc.) and some of the information is now obsolete.

Bulletproof Installs is an outstanding introduction to InstallShield and to software installation issues in general. An absolute beginner will of course find it valuable, but it may be most helpful to someone who has struggled a bit with installation problems. In addition to solid coverage of basics, there are important sections that help a developer figure out how to accomplish relatively advanced tasks, like customization of dialogs and calling Windows APIs from DLLs. Anyone who is a beginner or intermediate InstallShield programmer should spend some time with this book: it's almost certain that you'll learn something that will save you hours of grief -- and maybe save your company a tech support headache... You may find much of the material is familiar, especially if you've worked for a while with InstallShield, but you're still going to learn something, and what you learn will be worth the price of the book.

Audience: Beginner to intermediate

Table of Content:

1. What is an Install Program

2. Designing an Install Program

3. InstallShield File and Directory Organization

4. Creating a Simple Install Program

5. Explaining InstallScript

6. Understanding the Operating System

7. Defining the InstallShield API

8. Creating a Standard Install Program

9. Creating a Custom User Interface

10. Importing Routines

11. Creating an Advanced Install Program

This book is about developing installation programs using InstallShield 5.1. I originally bought this book more out of curiosity because I had never used InstallShield and wanted to understand the capabilities of the product. I searched on Amazon and B&N and this is the only book I found on InstallShield. With a rating of 4 stars, I thought I'd try it.

It's a good beginning book, I would have liked more details. It explained the directory structures of InstallShield and a newly created project and what some of these *.ini files were. It will give you insight on where you should place your code for doing modification to the setup scripts. It demonstrated writing custom handlers for their existing dialog ( which I found useful ), you may alter the behavior of the dialogs by making calls to the Windows SDK API functions, sorry no MFC calls. It explained writing your own custom wizard dialog from scratch. It demonstrated calling Win32 API functions and how to write your own custom DLL to be used with your project. Some useful information on the registry run once, copy over after re-boot, file association, the uninstall settings ....

Being that this is the only book available on InstallShield besides the actual reference manual, there isn't much to compare it with. My rating is about 7 out of 10 because it did teach me a thing or two about InstallShield.

I found Bulletproof Installs to be an excellent introductory book for InstallShield. I read 3/4's of it straight through before I started designing my install project. After I got familiar with InstallShield and the IDE, I never refered to it again. For reference, it is more efficient to use the self-contained InstallShield help files and the online help (which are both exceptional). So, this book should not be considered a reference, but an introduction.

First of all, I have to say that this book is very poorly organized. It's far too verbose and unorganized to use as a reference and it doesn't really work as a tutorial either. Chapters wander all over the place, sometimes just skimming the surface and sometimes diving into extremely low-level details. Very inconsistent.

There are lots of graphics in this book, but I didn't think they really added anything. Early in the book, for example, we see a graphic that displays seven wizard screens. The caption indicates that these are very important screens that are worth taking a look at in detail. You can't see them, though, because they're all stacked on top of each other and there are no follow-up graphics of the individual screens. And if the screens are worth taking a look at in detail, then why doesn't the text talk about them? There are lots of examples like this.

Over all, I didn't feel like this book really offered very much. Granted, it's one of the few books on InstallShield that are around, but it doesn't really go much beyond information that is readily available in the standard documentation.

If you're new to InstallShield, this might be a book you want to read, just to get a feel for things. If you've been using InstallShield for a while, though, save your money.

This book is excellent for either a developer who is new to InstallShield, or one who has some experience and wants to fill in some of the gaps. If you can not attend InstallShield's Beginning and Advanced classes, you MUST buy this book. I attended the classes, and I still found important new information in the book. Included are undocumented features of I.S., that you will (obviously) not find in the manuals. The book also gives some examples and suggestions that will save you endless hours of searching the on-line help and manuals. If you can not attend the I.S. classes, this book is a must buy.

I heard this book from a friend who attended Leslie's class. She likes it very much and recommends it to me. I am surprised to see a book could cover such a broad range of knowledge of Installshield and other related "know how". It started with simple example. Then, the author added a lot of great input of his own experience and knowledge about creating installation program. I definitely recommend this book to people who needs to create setup program.

I started to do an Install with Installshield that required many custom dialogs and custom features. I got all my information from newsgroups and installshield documentation. I then ordered this book 2 weeks into my development expecting it to answer some of my more difficult questions. It didn't. But, If you are just starting this book should save you some time understanding everything about a basic setup program.