Microsoft Sharepoint 2003 Unleashed

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.

I purchased the second edition of this SharePoint book and received it a few days ago. No joke folks, this book has been masterfully rewritten. I felt it was important to mention this as I think many of the negative comments on this board were in regards to the first edition. A colleague of mine owns the first edition and there is a definate improvement to the book. The "fluff" that plagued the first edition is gone, and is replaced by some serious content on site design, database maintenance, and step by step guides to all aspects of using SharePoint. For those who are looking for a developer's guide, this still isn't it, but it is by far one of the most solidly written guides to SharePoint available today.

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 picked up a copy of SharePoint 2003 Unleashed at TechEd and was happy that I did. It answered many of the questions that I had about the product, and included some good best practice info that I have started to use with our WSS implementation here. Only downside to the book was that it didn't go into much detail on custom programming with SharePoint, but 95% of what I needed was covered. I would definately recommend it if you were looking for a good, solid reference and design guide for a SharePoint project.

This is a good book and as a reference guide, it's great. I do feel that the editing could be better, it is easy to spot that different authors worked on this book. If the diting had been better and the very trivial first few chapters had been shortened somehwat I would have given this book a 5 star rating.