Customer Reviews

Microsoft Internet Information Server 4 0 Sourcebook

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Please do not buy this book like I did! Ignoring the previous customer's comment (sorry!) I went ahead and purchased it, buy was truly disgusted at how pathetic it truly is. As most of you probably do, I read at least 1 technical book a month, and have never read one written by as uninformed or inexperienced author as this. She has nothing even close to mastery of NT Server, nor proficiency in IIS. So keep looking!

I had the good luck to check it out of the library (i.e. did not spend any money) when I was researching the SMTP setup. On page 220 the author acknowledges the existence of SMTP service.

I am embarrassed that I did not look at this book long enough to recognize that the author knew nothing about NT and IIS before she started writing and almost nothing after she was finished. The publisher should be ashamed of releasing this book to the public. It is an example of greed. It was available to hit the shelves before nearly anything else on IIS 4.0 so those of us who needed to master the newest version of Information Server had little else to choose from when I bought it in April, 1998. Now I would say that absolutely every other book available is a better choice. I wonder what it feels like to offer something this bad to the public. I hope I never find out.

It is IIS3 for NT4. There is one chapter in the back regarding IIS4.0. Mostly it is an NT book writen from a lab perspective on a weak machine by authors who really don't know the subject as us professionals do. Waste of $ I took it back

The nicest thing I can say about this book is that it would be nice if I got my money back. The book is filled with fluff and screen shots, IIS 3.0 drivel, and plenty of filler and errors. You want fluff? There's a very meager section in the book about BIOSes, and how an 850 meg drive was substituted for a 1.2 gig hard drive because "NT would not install on the newer, higher capacity drive". If this book was written when 1.2 gig drives were "newer and higher capacity", some serious revision is in order. This BIOS section is next to useless, and what is it doing in a book (allegedly) on IIS 4.0? I bought the book hoping that FrontPage extensions would be covered. They were, in a few screen shots, with one screen shot captioned "You can very closely configure the Server Extensions with this tool." (sic). And sick.

This book has only 1 chapter (16) on IIS 4. It is a good book if you want to install NT 4 and/or IIS 3. IIS 4 has a totally new management interface which this book does not explore in the least. I am very disappointed with John Wiley and Johns for publishing this book. If you want something on IIS 4...THIS IS NOT THE BOOK!!!!!

I did not actually buy this book but I did sit down in the bookstore and review it for about 45 minutes. I was specifically looking for an IIS 4.0 book and the title led me to believe that this was such a book. IIS 4.0 is covered in an overview type fashion in about the last 1/4 of the book. As an overview it is fair, but this book is in NO WAY and IIS 4.0 guide or reference book for anyone looking to learn how to use IIS 4.0.

I have to agree with the previous customer's review. I wasted alot of time and money on this book! I feel the book was hastily released before the product was even fully developed. After all, IIS 4.0 has only been in Beta 3 for a month or so now! Keeping in mind the previous fact, I want someone who has had alot of experience with previous versions such as IIS3 etc. The last thing I need in my buiseness is somebody teaching me new servers when they have had little to no expirience themselves. Instead, Im going to go ahead and learn the new server myself and hope that and hope an experienced user will come along and write a more consise book so future book buyers will have a more dependable and stable source.

I write this to inform all thinking about purchasing the book to understand the complete lack of knowledge and research that went into it. Below I have enumerated a couple of specific examples, but these are only a small percentage of the overall mistakes that the author makes in this book. It is a shame that a publisher would allow a book like this to go to press, especially masquerading as some sort of reference material. The author wrote this book with no previous knowledge of Windows NT 4.0. By her own admission on page 40 this was her first attempt at installing Windows NT 4.0. I stopped reading around page 50, and merely skimmed the rest of the book. Due to an unforgivable number of technical inaccuracies, and mistakes, this book can be looked at as nothing more than someone keeping memoirs of there first time attempt at server building. The lack of technical knowledge that went into the writing of this book took 5 pages to surface. In a 'tip' on said page, the author says that the documentation for NT 4.0 is inaccurate because it states that NT 4.0 can only be installed from a CD-ROM. However she installed it from 3 floppies and a CD-ROM, therefore this was untrue. In fact the floppies have the required drivers for the CD-ROM drive which, by the way is required. Later in the book, Ms. Petrovsky states that a 486SX is "most emphatically not full 32-bit." This is not the case at all, I think she need to go back to processor 101 and look up what the SX and DX means, and the differneces between a 386 and a 486.