Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

by Mike Snell, Bruce Johnson, Brian C. Lanham, Sara Morgan, Shawn Wildermuth

Despite the snappy title, I actually found the book generally pretty good, but some chapters were definitely better than others. A few, I felt, were very good, such as requirements gathering and use cases, modelling the application, and so on – but many of the later chapters were less useful. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between how many code examples there were, and how good a chapter was. I think that the chapters with little code assumed that if you were through to doing the MCPD exam, you can probably work the code out for yourself, or perhaps that the presence of code examples showed a move away from considering the design bit of ‘Design and Developing…’

That said, the exam didn’t really match up with my expectations, or what was covered in the book. If anything, the exam seemed to be about a lot of the stuff I’d covered previously in the MCTS exams. So neither really hit exactly what I felt I should’ve been examined on, and the book and exam didn’t really cover the same areas. And there are probably better books out there for covering development generally.

By Tony Northrup, Shawn Wildermuth, Bill Ryan

Full Title: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation Self-Paced Training Kit

The best thing that I can say about this book is that it gives you a feel for the things covered in the 70-536 exam. Other than that, it’s the worst technical book I’ve read.

It is poorly structured. I mean answers to some of the ‘end of lesson’ questions refer to things that haven’t been introduced yet. If it isn’t an aspect of .NET that you’ve encountered in your work, you can’t answer that! And what’s with all the tables listing the features of all these different stream readers and writers – just show me ONE, and then explain how the others are DIFFERENT.

That said, I’d still have given this 3 stars if it weren’t for the errors. The book is littered with them. Examples of gzip decompression that actually compress, answers to questions with typos, hell, even answers to a completely different question in one chapter. I literally have too many to list. This is appalling quality control. If I can spot them, the reviewers should have. It’s just not good enough.

If it weren’t that it’s the ONLY book on the subject out here, I’d recommend ANYTHING else.

by Jeffrey Friedl

Regular expressions are the most useful tool in string manipulation going – but learning about them is a real pain. Essentially, they’re confusing for most folks because of an apparently opaque syntax, and because there are so many different ‘flavours’ of them.This book does more than anything else I’ve read to make all this clearer.

It’s a very ‘first principles’ book, looking at how regular expressions are processed, down to how they work through a string, character by character. This is useful, as it makes you realise how they work.

Later, it goes through more advanced features (lookaheads, etc.), and then it examines some of the most commonly used regular expression syntaxes – Java, .NET and Perl. It’s also got a lot of examples and good ideas on writing efficient expressions for the sort of stuff you do day to day – matching email, parsing arguments from the command line, that sort of thing.

At work, I’m our ‘regular expressions’ guy now, ‘cos I read this book, and I use it as a reference on a frequent basis. I also use regular expressions LOTS in my programming – and by God is it faster than writing code to process strings.

My only complaint – well, I wouldn’t mind a few wee examples in other languages – Javascript being the obvious one, and PHP and Ruby. They’re all VERY similar to Perl, so it wouldn’t take long to highlight any differences and explain how to use them.

However, it is a great book for the subject – just look at it on Amazon. My opnion? Every coder should read this book (or one just like it). Programming without Regexes is just crazy.

Three books I’ve been using lately…

Microsoft Content Management Server 2000 – Addison Wesley

This book covers a lot, and so is quite fat. I found the chapters a bit variable – some, especially those on planning your site, were excellent. Other missed steps when describing how to do things, which made it very confusing. I felt that some of the code examples lacked context too – the functions might have worked okay, but where in the project were they? Also, the chapter order confused me – I’d much rather have had intro, install, configure, develop, etc.. Instead, this seemed to have a bit here, a bit there. For example, I would have moved chapter 3 (CMS Architecture) before chapter 2 (Installation), and followed that up with the entire of section 4 (security). All in all, not bad, but not as good as…

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server – Packt

This book seems to me to have a much clearer layout. Introduction, Installation, Configuration – that’s what I like. Although a slimmer book, somehow this does seem to cover more ground. The text is distinctly techy, and it lacks some of the ‘planning’ chapters mentioned above, but it really gets in under the hood, and tells you how to do the sorts of things you’re bound to want to know. For example, I’d been annoyed by how the previous book hadn’t really described channel rendering scripts.

All in all, I was impressed by this and would recommend it, although…

Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development – Packt

…this is also a pretty good book. Aimed as an ‘advanced’ book, it tackles more advanced subjects (like SharePoint integration, Infopath, search, etc.). It also seems to be aimed at ‘making your life easier’ – I like books with title like ‘Useful Placeholder Controls’. It sort of falls into the ‘things you’ll probably want to know’

So, in summary, I’d recommend the last two books – they share some of the same authors. And if you haven’t had a question answered by Stefan Gossner, you haven’t worked with MCMS yet. It’s just a bit of a shame that these books will be redundant come Office 12

Professional Javascript for Web Developers
By Nicholas C. Zakas

Okay, not a book for entertainment (unless you’re a bit odd) but so good I thought it deserved a mention. What can I say. Modern, thorough, well thought and dealing with practical problems – not those of image rollovers and noddy stuff, but deeper things, such as dealing with cross browser differences in event handling, etc.. Goes into depth on the DOM and XML, coding styles and the ‘inheritance’ model of Javascript. In short, the kinds of things professionals trying to build ‘Googlesque’ user interfaces will need. It’s not a reference manual, and it’s not really a ‘cook book’, it’s something in between, and it is the best technical read I’ve come across for a while!