Customer Reviews

SharePoint 2003 Advanced Concepts: Site Definitions, Custom Templates, and Global Customizations

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

 

 

I agree with the previous reviewer that the title of the book might be missleading but content, ease of use for this books is what the rating should be based off of and it is excellent!

I think the title "Advanced Concepts" could be clarified with for "Advance Users/Administrators", etc... as it probably the only book you need to quickly learn how to customize SharePoint. If it's used by Advance Users/Administrators... then it can be implied that it's Advanced Concepts. Any case, i'm not a editor.

The book takes you through the most relevant and practical examples of the information you need and not baby you with hundreds of pages of basic stuff that most people that's familiar with MS technology already knows.

You can read this book from cover to cover in about 3 hours and you'll feel empowered and knolwedge enough to get advance customization done with sharepoint. I highly recommend this book for experienced administers/MS programmers to get a concise view to the topics of Site customization and doesn't want to read extra fluff like in other books.

I've been looking for a book that would allow me to customize SharePoint sites beyond the out-of-package limitation for some time. I looked at a number of SharePoint books and most of them had some useful information but there were all more focused on other aspects of SharePoint. Customization is what this book is all about! If you have ever gone through the pain of creating and customizing multiple SharePoint sites, you know exactly what I am talking about and you do need this book.

Don't let the title scare you away. This book is surprisingly easy to follow; even the complex parts are broken down in clear and concise way and made understandable for average mortal. As long as you know how to create sites, change web parts layout and can handle modifying XML files, you won't have a problem keeping up. It covers pretty much every aspect on the subject - custom sites and list definitions, modifying themes, email and help, expanding functionality, integration with other products, and does it on less than 300 pages. Kudos to the author, I am tired of having to read through hundreds pages of stuffing just because the author is getting paid per page.

Even though it is not a big book in pages, it is an excellent book in content! The core of the book focuses on creating site definitions; with many excellent examples and useful tips. Other topics covered include template construction, definitions for Lists and customization of themes and alerts.

There is other information on SharePoint which address these issues, but this is the only book wherein the information is centralized and readily accessible to the reader. None compare in clarity and ease of reading, I highly recommend it.

While there are other books that have been published in the past year on the topic of SharePoint and customizations and what not, I would have to say that this book brings all the pieces together, gives the explanations to UI developers, administrators and developers that they need.

Unfortunately there haven't been any books that have talked at length on Site Definitions. I was very happy to get a hold of this now, but wish I had it a couple months back when I started customizing our sites. It is well written and explains virtually all its concepts by working through examples with real code. I haven't gotten through it all yet, but what I have read is very helpful.

I enjoyed reading this book and easily flew through it over a few sessions during a week. It was easy to follow, has in-depth examples, excellent documentation and inside tips about the sharepoint application configuration. Best of all the Authors were able to not only walk the reader through the examples, but also they were careful to point out the places that a person could easily expand on their work while covering the pro's and con's of the approach. It was a good read.

Jason & Stacy have done a great job digging into the details of site definitions. You rarely find this level of depth in available resources, including in the WSS/SPS SDK or MSDN. Wish I had this a long time ago!

I was very excited about this book, especially after the glowing reviews, but the first thing I noticed on opening the book was the large font size -- it has 240 pages of actual content, but it would be under 200 in a less generous layout.

Second, it is very well written, but it basically restates information from other sources. Granted, the SharePoint Administration help is not well-written, and having someone interpret it for you may be worth $25, but it's not worth that to me. I really expected to learn something new ("Advanced Concepts" might have misled me).

I hate writing a bad review, and this book does a good job of documenting ONET.XML, explaining ghosting, and giving you a sound general approach (create a Template through the SharePoint UI, then un-ZIP the .STS file and dissect the result). But it falls short in the following areas:

SPS Templates (not covered)
CAML (not covered)
Code (must be typed in manually)
Errors (Figure 4-13 on Page 189 can't be right...)

If you're not familiar with concepts like CSS, XML, and ASP, then this book is probably for you. It is clear and well-written (did I say that already?), add another 400 pages and it would be a great book.