Audience: Beginner to intermediate
Table of Content:
1. What is an Install Program
2. Designing an Install Program
3. InstallShield File and Directory Organization
4. Creating a Simple Install Program
5. Explaining InstallScript
6. Understanding the Operating System
7. Defining the InstallShield API
8. Creating a Standard Install Program
9. Creating a Custom User Interface
10. Importing Routines
11. Creating an Advanced Install Program
This book is about developing installation programs using InstallShield 5.1. I originally bought this book more out of curiosity because I had never used InstallShield and wanted to understand the capabilities of the product. I searched on Amazon and B&N and this is the only book I found on InstallShield. With a rating of 4 stars, I thought I'd try it.
It's a good beginning book, I would have liked more details. It explained the directory structures of InstallShield and a newly created project and what some of these *.ini files were. It will give you insight on where you should place your code for doing modification to the setup scripts. It demonstrated writing custom handlers for their existing dialog ( which I found useful ), you may alter the behavior of the dialogs by making calls to the Windows SDK API functions, sorry no MFC calls. It explained writing your own custom wizard dialog from scratch. It demonstrated calling Win32 API functions and how to write your own custom DLL to be used with your project. Some useful information on the registry run once, copy over after re-boot, file association, the uninstall settings ....
Being that this is the only book available on InstallShield besides the actual reference manual, there isn't much to compare it with. My rating is about 7 out of 10 because it did teach me a thing or two about InstallShield.
