About a week ago when I'd just added links to a number of On-line chapters to the WSS FAQ sites and was starting to read all those (Introduction to...) Chapter Ones, I wasn't particularly complementary about one aspect of Chapter One of the Wrox book "Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007" by Amanda Murphy and Shane Perran.
It was in fact that old aversion of mine to inaccurate naming of the SharePoint products and in this case it was mainly that having done a good list of why you would want to use Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, they went on to give an equally good list of when to use MOSS 2007 only they called that "SharePoint" and only "SharePoint". Well Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is SharePoint too!
I thought at the time that the problems this caused in that chapter might well vanish when they moved on because this book is after all named in the sub-title as being specifically a book on MOSS 2007 (even though the main title line is the equally confusing "SharePoint 2007" because of course WSS 3.0 is also a SharePoint product that came out in 2007).
Anyway, now that I've got hold of a copy of the book, I can confirm that I was right. Once past chapter one and the naming confusions this is a very valuable book for anyone wanting to quickly get up to speed on just what MOSS 2007 is and what it's main constituent parts are. (Just ignore that it often says only "SharePoint" - this
is MOSS 2007 stuff)
I'd actually recommended it a couple of times in the SharePoint public newsgroups before I'd done more than glance through it - because the chapter titles covered everything that those two people wanted to know.
Now however I've sat down and actually read it (or most of it at this stage) in detail and I am fairly amazed by the massive amount of ground they cover and the detail (but clear detail with many useful small screen shots) they include.
Now I know a fair bit about most of the things covered by this book, but even so I found myself finding small but useful details that I didn't know.
A simple example of that was for instance the section on Image Libraries. I've been used to Document Libraries since SharePoint Team Services (v1, to you late comers) and Image Libraries are nothing new to me as a storage location for images. Also the *concept* of adding PowerPoint slide shows to an Image Library was clear as well, but in a few clear pages the writers of this book were able to show me that there was much more I could do with these things than I'd imagined. Practical things in a company situation too ...
If anything the only problem is deciding who should buy the book. My conclusion is that it should be bought by people who already know the SharePoint v2 products on behalf of people new to SharePoint. That way the people with the existing knowledge (of I would hope by now MOSS 2007 and not just the v2 products) will have time to quickly run through the chapters to try to pick up the information they didn't already know before passing the book on to the real target audience.
The other open question I have is whether that target audience is Administrators or Users. I rather suspect the actual target audience is the Administrator who also does the site design, but I actually think the book could very well be given to key power users so they could use as much of the wide range of things offered by MOSS 2007 (and mentioned in this book) as possible.
The only snag is that they will probably then make the poor site administrator's life a misery if he is the kind of person who (wisely?) wants to offer as little functionality as possible to make his/her job as easy as possible.
But that's hardly the fault of the book's writers. Buy it!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0470124490/heme0f