The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide [With CDROM]

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.

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/).

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.

This book is a MUST for anyone developing MSI installation packages professionally. Although it discusses InstallShield of Windows Installer version 1.5 and the current version is 2.02, the translation to the new version is not a problem. The best part of the book is the explanation of the MSI architecture. It is much easier to comprehend than the MSDN documentation. I was slightly annoyed by the number of typographical errors which occur at the rate of about once every three pages in the early chapters.

This book is very good. Anything (with the exception I note below) I needed regarding this product, I could find in this book. I had, however, from the publisher's calling it "comprehensive," hoped for documentation of the Automation Interface. There is no significant coverage of this important interface to this product.