Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for learning; a bit cumbersome as a reference
Review: This is an excellent and very comprehensive book. The coverage is very complete; in fact the main problem with the book is that the authors go into so much detail that it can be a little frustrating when you try to use the book as a reference.For learning, however, it is perfect. I worked through the book from the beginning, and found that it guided me accurately and fairly quickly through setting up a 1200 man-hour 4 person project. What I particularly liked was that it covered some special settings I happen to need in the course of covering the related topics, rather than having a chapter for each pulldown menu. For example, there are many things you can do with the Task Information dialog, but the book goes back to that screen at different points in order to explain different details. I needed to set my tasks as "Fixed Work", rather than "Fixed Units" or "Fixed Duration"; failing to make this setting would have caused chaos for me, but chapter 10, "Assigning Resources and Costs to Tasks", made the right answer quite clear. The book covers every aspect of Project 98. There are excellent sections on reports, views, and formatting, and good tips on how to tailor the input screens to your needs. It also covers integrating multiple projects and the use of macros and VB. Perhaps even more usefully, it reviews some basic project management guidelines as it goes through the tasks involved in setting up and tracking a project, so that it is almost possible to learn project management (or at least the planning and tracking skills needed) from this book at the same time as learning the tool itself. The book is long--close to 1,000 pages of material--but project management is a complicated subject and the book is not to blame for that. However, the very thing that makes the book valuable for learning makes it a poor reference. For example, if you have a question about task data, a look in the index reveals six columns starting with "Task". The answer you want is no doubt there, but it may take some digging. Another example: there are four separate chapters, covering 130 pages, just on the topics of allocating resources and costs. This is a complex subject, but it makes it hard to swiftly dive in and get an overview of the tool's capabilities in the area. Overall, I think this is a terrific book to get for learning to use Project 98. I'm still looking for the perfect quick reference though.
| 
