Rating: 
Summary: Bloated and pointless
Review: Though the author's writing style is clear and to the point, this is simply just another unnecessarily bloated, empty book for small-minded people who like the look of huge volumes on their desk.In the first few chapters, this book simply repeats already-seen Windows 2000 / Installer information. In the next few, it repeats what is in the InstallShield help files. Worse, the programs that come with the book ALL need registering before use, even the ones that claim to be 'full products' (ie. gratis). Why buy this when you can freely download the information from Microsoft / Installshield? No reason at all.
Rating:
Summary: What hells is this?
Review: Too bad to have this book. It is also too bad for the installshield to have such a poor book as its only recommanded or available material for its users. If you want to know how to use the installshield to solve your problem, just don't buy this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Saved my skin
Review: 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.
| 
