Customer Reviews

The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide (with CD-ROM)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I'm a senior software engineer who is trying to learn about InstallShield and Windows Installer technology. While this book contains alot of useful information, I found the book to be very poorly organized and poorly written.

In a book like this I expect the author to be give an introduction/overview and then to build from there in a logical manner. The book should explain why things are as they are and not just how they are. This book fails at this.

If you already know InstallShield and/or Windows Installer and are looking to firm up your knowledge, this book may be able to fill in some gaps and firm up your knowledge. If you are trying to learn these products this book will likely be confusing, cumbersome, and frustrating.

It is a shame that this is currently the only book available on this subject.

There are a number of editors (technical editors, copy editors, etc.) listed in the credits. I can't believe the number of grammatical and other errors that they let through.

After reading and re-reading this book for most of a year, I have yet to glean any useful information from it. The author has a very wordy writing style, which tends to obscure an already complex subject. He spends many pages essentially repeating what is in the InstallShield online help, giving lots of detail on what to do, but nothing on when or why to do it.

If a dyslexic writer wrote a treatise on the U.S. tax code, it would read like this book.

My advice is that if you're an experienced programmer and the boss ever comes to you and asks if you'd take over the Installshield duties from the last person who (inexplicably) is no longer going to handle them, don't spend your money on this book -- put it directly into a new resume or job-hunting service.

PS -- CalvinBall was the favorite game of Calvin, from comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, in which Calvin simply did whatever he wanted, and pronounced that as the rules as he went.

I've used InstallShield products for about three years now, and recently started using ISWI to package software - and became completely lost! As such, I turned to this book for help.

The book first moves you through the Win 2000 deployment model and walks you constructing an Installer product using the Microsoft MSI SDK - which works wonders and really solidifies an understanding of the MSI data model and methodology. The book then drills down and explains, part by part, the workings of ISWI nicely...Although it sometime reads more like an encyclopedia than what I really look for in a tech book.

The only caveats is many grammer issues sprinkled through the book and screenshots that refer to an old version (although it does incite a sort of scavendar-hunt mentality that actually HELPS learning the product). However, the core of the book is solid and informative...if you have to work with ISWI - this book should definitely be in your reading list for the near future.

Though the author's writing style is clear and to the point, this is simply just another unnecessarily bloated, empty book for small-minded people who like the look of huge volumes on their desk.

In the first few chapters, this book simply repeats already-seen Windows 2000 / Installer information. In the next few, it repeats what is in the InstallShield help files.

Worse, the programs that come with the book ALL need registering before use, even the ones that claim to be 'full products' (ie. gratis).

Why buy this when you can freely download the information from Microsoft / Installshield? No reason at all.

This is just about the only book on Installshield one can find. That is the reason why I bought it. I was, well, disappointed.
This ain't a book to teach one how to use Installshield, it reads more like a manual. Why doesn't the author (or some other
authors) write a book with 20-30 simple examples to show how this thing works? That way I can get the hang of it in one week.

I'm really disappointed in this book for several reasons. First, 98% of the book is written for people who have intricate and detailed information about InstallShield and Windows Installer. Here's an example: "You tell the Windows Installer how to process a custom action through the Type attribute in the CustomAction table." You are left baffled as to how I, the developer, would know how to access the CustomAction table, much less get to the Type attribute, much less how to start to accomplish whatever that line meant. ONLY THE EXPERTS MIGHT FIND THIS INFO FROM THE BOOK HELPFUL. The second huge disappointment is after reading 450 pages, there are exactly 2 examples for the student. What a truly waste of money to get 2 examples in 450 pages!!!!
The author should re-title the book "The official guide to InstallShield for Bob Baker and other members of the technical staff at InstallShield." No joke, that's the intended audience for this book!!!!!!!!!

I stopped reading it half way thru. It was taking way to long to get the information I want it. Did not help me dealing with different Operating Systems (95,98,NT,2K). Very important to know how to handle the particular OS and IE, and I did not see any info about it. How to handle ADO, DAO MDAC's etc..

I have used Express, Standard and now the Pro Windows Installer and InstallShield is very buggy anyway, so be carefull. Check the News Group, it's loaded with emails for help. That's were many answers that helped me came from.

Wait till the book's price is half off!

Don't buy this book hoping to get any insight into InstallShield Professional. The two products are so dissimilar that about the only useful information in it would be in regards to the InstallScript language. I have yet to locate a book that deals exclusively with InstallShield Professional. For InstallShield Professional, the most useful source of information I've found is the knowledgebase (http://support.installshield.com/kb/).

With zero setup experience, I got conscripted for a rush job repackaging some spaghetti code legacy MSIs - I figured, they usually give this stuff to the junior folks, so how hard can it be? In three days I installed InstallShield and managed to completely trash my dev machine (it will no longer install *anything*). There are two problems with the free online MS/InstallShield documentation: it's structured as a reference, and it's not always correct (for example, on where to sequence nested MSIs, InstallShield 8 Help, MSDN, and support.microsoft.com give three different answers, some of them mutually exclusive - InstallShield was wrong).

Baker's book is not comprehensive but it provided a solid and cohesive foundation for an understanding of Windows Installer, and supplied me with the intuition necessary to guess the correct answer from ambiguous docs. It took three hours for me to skim this in a cafe, and has probably saved me at least three to five days of barking up the wrong tree.