Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

William Stanek is well known for his acclaimed "Pocket Consultants" from Microsoft, and in this book he delivers an indepth, authoritative guide to Internet Information Services for both web and application servers. In 520 pages (including index), the author details just about everything you need to know to succeed with IIS. IIS is a major new web server from Microsoft, not just an update, and this makes this book even more important. Stanek has organized this book into 14 chapters and one appendix. He starts Ch. 1 right off with a look at the new configuration architecture. He tells you how it works and how to work with it. Ch. 2 discusses everything you need to know to successfully plan a deployment and install. Clear organization in an indepth, authoritative way make this chapter alone worth the cost of the book. This important book is designed to accommodate readers at every skill level, from beginning administrators to intermediates to advanced system administrators. If you are new to iis, you'll want to read the early chapters closely in particular Ch. 1 and 2. If you are an intermediate admin or advanced admin, you'll probably only need one read of these chapters to get everything you need to know to install and configure and optimize your boxes. From Chapter 3 on the author, Stanek, gets into the deeper and deeper details. There's almost 100 pages on IIS apps, app pools, .NET apps, and .NET configuration. Two chapters on security, certs, and SSL. Two chapters on performance tuning, monitoring, and logging, followed by an exceptional chapter on backup and recovery. A comprehensive reference to the IIS modules and schema completes the book. Excellent and the best of the best!

If you're old hat to IIS, you may be surprised to learn that IIS 7.0 is completely rebuilt from the ground up. The bad news is, the interface has been redesigned from top to bottom. The good news is, the rework was done to bring the IIS technology more inline with the Microsoft .NET Framework. I bought this book because the online resources I've found have been very poor (yes, including Microsoft's own sites). I've been pleased to find that the book dives straight into IIS, provides me the details I would need to manage my server, and (thankfully) provides a lot of screen shots. As an added bonus, Stanek offers suggestions on customization and points out areas that will require some decision-making, such as the hardware you plan to use and the security practices that you should think through. If you're new to IIS as a whole, you'll have an easier time using this book to learn if you come from a development background. If you're new to Microsoft networking as well as IIS, you might need a little more detail and I'd suggest you start with a book on Windows Server 2008. As for me, this Swiss Army Knife of IIS Administration is probably going to be well-thumbed-through before the end of the year.

I was suprised to find how different IIS 7 is from IIS 6, so different it might as well have a totally different name, but I wasn't worried as with his other books Stanek does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the ins and outs of IIS 7. Using this book, I confidently helped plan our site wide upgrade and then deployed IIS 7 throughout our server farms with complete success. Excellent resource!

I picked this up as we were moving our front-end web servers to IIS 7 and as Stanek's other books have been extremely helpful. Having read it cover to cover and compared it to other IIS books available, I found it to be the best by far. This book focuses on exactly what I needed to know to get up to speed and to get the job done every day. As a reference manual it can't be beat.

I've had IIS 7 Administrator's Pocket Consultant for several months now. I've read it cover to cover and refer to it all the time. I'm always amazed at how much information William can pack into his pocket consultants and especially with this one. William starts out by telling you IIS 7 is completely different from its predecessors and then showing what you need to know right away to be successful. Then chapter by chapter he teaches you everything you need to know to be successful with IIS deployment, configuration and management. The book also includes excellent details on monitoring, backup, recovery and troubleshooting. What I like best about Williams' books is the friendly easy to understand language. He's always very organized and clear. He doesn't stray off topic into tangents and has a solid sense of what's important and what's not. I like to think of his approach as being like the cool History teacher who teaches everything you need to know, while you're having too much fun to realize how much you're learning. There's a wealth of real world examples and reference materials throughout. This makes the book perfect for administrators and for developers who build and manage IIS installs. Highly, highly recommended.