Even though most of those SharePoint on-line chapters I mentioned in the previous blog are variations on an "Introduction to SharePoint" theme, it's still worth glancing through them.

Not so much to help you decide which books to buy, although that too, but mainly to help you decide which books not to buy.

I've started working through these on-line chapters and the first one I looked at was the Sharepoint "Bible" from Wiley. Well I m certainly NOT going to buy that !

There are continual references in that chapter to WSS 2007. Even in the early betas the WSS version was never called WSS 2007 and always WSS 3.0.

If the guys can't even get the name of a product right, what sort of message does that give you about the quality of the rest of the book ?

Certainly this is enough for me to completely discard all thoughts of buying the book. There are after all enough books written or co-written by SharePoint MVPs (the "Bible" as far as I can see wasn't) and say what you will about SharePoint MVPs, but we do have a good knowledge of the various SharePoint products and versions of products - and we sure as heck don't call WSS 3.0 "WSS 2007".

 

P.S. This makes you wonder if that book ever had a review process and if so who reviewed it. Our MVP book did and we had a very good technical reviewer who pointed out several minor (my story!) inaccuracies in my chapter. I have a horrible feeling that - in the severe time pressure I was in to make changes to the text as a result of his suggestions - I missed one (a trip to England and away from computers came at just the wrong time), so I do know how mistakes can stay in a text, but this WSS 2007 is so blatant an error and occurs something like ten times in that chapter, that even the most time-pressured author couldn't miss amending this when the mistake was pointed out to him/her.