Customer Reviews

Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This book is a long winded explanation of the features of SharePoint 2003. It provides redundent how tos with little explanation of how to do anything that is not vanilla out of the box. I suggest simply becoming familar with the Administrative Guide that Microsoft produced. You'll be you degree closer to the source and 33 dollars richer in the pocket.

It would be easy to mistake this book as a developer reference, having the book come from SAMS. This is not the case however. As a developer, i was extremley disappointed in the content this book contained. There are no code samples whatsoever, and no discussion of building custom web parts. Moreover, very important information has been completley omissed from the text. Things like customizing the look and feel of the portal by integration with frontpage 2003, and utilizing the complex nature of the single sign on service are not discussed for more than a paragraph, and these are very important points for anyone designing any sharepoint solution. This book can be described as a power user manual and implementation guide at best. If you're looking for a book with a lot of fluff, no examples on how to do things you are going to need to know how to do, some examples on things that are already self-explanatory, then this is a perfect book for you. Basically the information in this book is a poor rewrite of the SPS administrator manual that is on the cd. There is some helpful information in this book on certain topics, but it is not nearly as comprehensive as you would think it should be for its size.

I will have to put myself in the same corner as a few of my fellow reviewers, this is not a developer book, by far. It also has a lot of repetition in it. You can explain the different security groups twice, but 5 times seems like a little too much... The fact that web parts and customisations are not covered is like the biggest dissapointment to me, because that is what I am looking for in a book. How to use Sharepoint is something you can learn in the online help.

The authors take a project management approach to SharePoint. The book takes you through all the steps necessary when starting a new SharePoint system. My issue with this approach is that unless you have a reasonable understanding of SharePoint first, it's difficult to grasp the concepts they are explaining.

This would be a good book as a guide to creating a SharePoint system from scratch but you'll be better off getting another book to actually learn the software first.

I've purchased both this book and the Resource Kit and tried to use them like lifelines because my company is going ga-ga over SharePoint (and I mostly agree). While this book has a lot going for it--it's well written and has a good teaching point of view, I've found a ton of errors in it that have caused me to lose my confidence in it. I still refer to it as a tutorial, but it's an awful lot of money to pay for a book that I can't trust. My advice is to rely on the Resource Kit as a reference and only buy this book as a teaching guide.

As someone that reads alot of books, both technical and non-technical, this is definetly the worst written book I've ever seen. It seems it has not been read by any editors.
You can find typos, spelling mistakes, grammar errors and such all over the place. The authors just copy-pasted some of them over and over again. The text is boring to death, and for some reason, the least needed parts are repeated several times. For example, the meaning of "Description" of a field in a list is explained more than a dozen times in less that 5 pages.
All of this, even before touching the content and subject of the book itself. The order of the content was not well thought of, the style of writing is boring, and the content itself is not very informative.
As a developer, I did not expect to find much on the development side of SharePoint, but I doubt that even technicians and solution architects will find much help in this one.

(actual review is 2.5 stars). Even though this book has a lot of pages, the content is pretty shallow and it suffers from an apparent desire to address to many different types of reader, from the developer to the administrator, to the technology decision maker. The result is that the book is weak in two key areas: development and administration. For readers who want reasonable depth in those areas, I suggest finding another source. For readers who want a broad brush, the book is a fine work.

I do SharePoint administration and development and own the other five SharePoint 2003 books currently on the market. This book is useless from any perspective except perhaps as a doorstop. It just repeats the same content chapter after chapter about the features of SharePoint while offering no insight as to installing, configuring or developing. You would get more insight about SharePoint reading a product brochure or just cruising Microsoft's web site. Avoid this book!

I was a bit skittish about buying this book based on some of the negative reviews. Having played around with the software but still having alot of questions, I wanted to judge for myself so I picked it up at the bookstore. If you can make it through the first section, which is basically fluff, there is some excellent content in the later parts of the book, particularily in the sections on Office use with SharePoint and SQL maintenance of the databases, which is not covered much at all in the other SharePoint books out today. My guess is that many of the other reviewers may have stopped reading after the first few chapters, and I can't really blame them. I would agree that it is better to skip them and going straight to the good stuff.

I have had this book for almost a year now and read almost the whole thing. One aspect of this book which makes it a very worthwhile read is the clear differentiation which the authors maintain between Windows Sharepoint Services (free to implement) and Sharepoint Portal Server (can be VERY expensive.) Most Sharepoint books I have read fail to make this distinction and suffer greatly for it. I very much appreciated the clear differences between the products.

This book is a great primer for someone looking to get a Sharepoint implementation up and running (which I have been.) Understanding scalability, using farms, managing the databases are all covered in sufficient detail to be able to implement it yourself and have it survive use.

I was disappointed that the scope of the book wasn't wider. I would loved to have seen some developer information, or at least a list of resources. I would also liked to have seen more guidance on creating sites, organization of sites and other setup information. Perhaps a better title would have been Sharepoint 2003 Infrastructure Unleashed.

With those comments, I can also say that I'd buy another volume of this and appreciate the authors attention to detail, especially in clearly differentiating between the free and the expensive Sharepoint products.