Rating: 
Summary: yeah whatever
Review: blah blah blah blah blah - that review was obviously canned, probably by one of the authors friends - can we have an honest review please?
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent - A Must Have
Review: Don't bother buying the Resource Kit - buy this book instead. It explains the architecture and lets you know upfront what is and is not currently available in the 1.0 release of the product.Hacks to provide functionality that should have been in the product are covered (although with strong warnings about no support from Microsoft). If you've suddenly been handed a project involving SharePoint, buy this book! It will save you many hours of grief.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent - A Must Have
Review: Don't bother buying the Resource Kit - buy this book instead. It explains the architecture and lets you know upfront what is and is not currently available in the 1.0 release of the product. Hacks to provide functionality that should have been in the product are covered (although with strong warnings about no support from Microsoft). If you've suddenly been handed a project involving SharePoint, buy this book! It will save you many hours of grief.
Rating:
Summary: an waste of materials waster for this book
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer that if this is your first exposure with SPS, that this book can quickly get over your head. I consider myself to be a fairly technical person (MCSE) and I can barely keep my eyes open for this snoozer. The authors attempt to keep the reading light but then dive so deep into the intricacies of the product that I start to wonder if we're talking about the same product. So far it has taken me 2 weeks to read 100 pages and that's not because I am a slow reader. To be fair to the book, I ordered this book with a different set of expectations. I was looking for a book that I could use as a resource. If I wanted to know about indexing, I could go to page ## to find out about indexing. This book presents its information in more of case study scenario where they want you to understand how all the pieces work together. If you want to know about all the pieces of SPS, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for specific solutions, you may want to look elsewhere. I still have hopes that this book will be of some use to me, but the answers aren't coming easily.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a Resource Manual
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer that if this is your first exposure with SPS, that this book can quickly get over your head. I consider myself to be a fairly technical person (MCSE) and I can barely keep my eyes open for this snoozer. The authors attempt to keep the reading light but then dive so deep into the intricacies of the product that I start to wonder if we're talking about the same product. So far it has taken me 2 weeks to read 100 pages and that's not because I am a slow reader. To be fair to the book, I ordered this book with a different set of expectations. I was looking for a book that I could use as a resource. If I wanted to know about indexing, I could go to page ## to find out about indexing. This book presents its information in more of case study scenario where they want you to understand how all the pieces work together. If you want to know about all the pieces of SPS, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for specific solutions, you may want to look elsewhere. I still have hopes that this book will be of some use to me, but the answers aren't coming easily.
Rating:
Summary: Wasted reading material
Review: I got this book because my manager believed it would cut time on me getting aquainted with SPS and may be able to customize the Dashboard the way we want it instead of the 'Microsoft' limited layout. To my dissapointmnet, the book is just repeating what the online documentation already provides and the content of the book didn't seem anything helpful. My best bet is that the authors here just wanted to put a book and sell it without any idea what they were supposed to provide with. This is a sample book of what a book shouldn't be published at all.
Rating: 
Summary: If you need training wheels, keep walking!
Review: If you want to know how to install and configure the SharePoint out-of-the-box user experience, your expectations won't be met by this book. But, if you want to know the product inside and out (but especially inside!) then don't move an inch - your here! There's no other place to get this detailed level of information - not even the resource kit! The more tedious parts come with click-by-click instructions. We are a Microsoft SharePoint ISV and have accomplished a number of significant SharePoint and Team Services implementations in both the Federal and commercial market. I wish I had this book before we started. Yes, the book is technically challenging. It "gives away" a lot of the tips and tricks that it took several years to learn while developing knowledge-based applications over the Exchange storage system. It exposes these secrets so that just about any experienced developer can produce truly flexible, re-deployable knowledge applications and portals. If you're afraid to skin your knees, stay in the sandbox.
Rating:
Summary: If you need training wheels, keep walking!
Review: If you want to know how to install and configure the SharePoint out-of-the-box user experience, your expectations won't be met by this book. But, if you want to know the product inside and out (but especially inside!) then don't move an inch - your here! There's no other place to get this detailed level of information - not even the resource kit! The more tedious parts come with click-by-click instructions. We are a Microsoft SharePoint ISV and have accomplished a number of significant SharePoint and Team Services implementations in both the Federal and commercial market. I wish I had this book before we started. Yes, the book is technically challenging. It "gives away" a lot of the tips and tricks that it took several years to learn while developing knowledge-based applications over the Exchange storage system. It exposes these secrets so that just about any experienced developer can produce truly flexible, re-deployable knowledge applications and portals. If you're afraid to skin your knees, stay in the sandbox.
Rating:
Summary: The best SPS book out there
Review: One of the most useful book out there. For once, a book that gives more than the obvious. Packed with many tips on how to cutomize Sharepoint that you will not find anywhere else. A must have for anyone implementing Sharepoint
Rating:
Summary: Packed with useful information
Review: SharePoint Portal Server is a relatively new Microsoft product, released during the middle of 2001. Currently (as of January 2002) there is only one other book available for sale on the topic (The Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Resource Kit). Whereas you'd expect one of the first books to appear on SharePoint Portal Server to do little more than cover out of the box features of the product, this book goes much farther. It covers the standard features of the product, but also goes under the hood to explain how the product works and even explains how to perform "unsupported" customizations of the product. Then the book goes even further by showing you how to extend the product on your own to create custom knowledge sharing applications. For the reader that is just experiencing SharePoint Portal Server for the first time, this book may quickly dive into more technical detail than you're prepared for. However, as you begin real-world deployments of the product, you'll quickly appreciate all the extra research and advice that this book provides.
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