I say it's not definitive because I think that means there's nothing more to be said on the subject. The MS Windows Installer technology is huge, and it would take a book five times the length of this one to be definitive. This book describes the client/server architecture of the installer and explains about the important tables in the database. It demonstrates how to make an installation package with Visual Studio, but assumes you will be using a commercial package in real life. To get the most out of the book, you'll need to install Orca, which is available in the Microsoft Installer SDK. Orca lets you view and edit the tables in an installation package.
After a bit of orientation, each chapter tackles a common installation topic: patches, ASP.NET, .NET assemblies, windows services, and the installer APIs. Wilson is good about explaining why something should be done a certain way and giving you the background to understand it.
My only disappointment is that, due to the shortness of the book, there is no room to go into more detail about some of the standard actions. I'd like to have seen an example of the minimal set of actions needed to install a file; kind of the hello world of installer. The beginning example he provides is built with Visual Studio, and I'm sure it puts in a lot more actions than are really needed, so it's hard to mentally associate what the package is doing with the action records that are doing it. To really understand how the installer works, you should be able to build a package from scratch with Orca.
There are few or no typos, which is amazing for a computer book nowadays, and I didn't find any errors of fact.
