Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft)) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I purchased this book because it was the only one on this topic available at the time. I am a beginner when it comes to SharePoint, but I am also an experienced web designer. This book is written at my level exactly, and I found it easy to learn from. However, there are some errors in it. For example in several places it says that CSS styles should be contained in a <script> tag, when it should have been a <style> tag. There are little problems like this throughout the book.

Because I am experienced with web development already, it was easy for me to see and account for the mistakes in the book.

There are grammar problems, and even I caught some misspelled words. Additionally, the practice and example files that come with the book are not very helpful.

This book was the first one available, and perhaps in a rush to have it published, it was not carefully edited. If there are other books available now, I would recommend looking into them instead of this one.

This is not a bad read for novice instruction. This book does not get into as much detail as our group would have liked seeing in the first book release for this product, but it still provided some good examples and a platform to build upon.
I would definitely suggest it for new site owners that need to be able to make custom changes and do not have much of experience with this kind of product. Experienced web designers will not get much of a benefit from this book.

Like many tech book series, Microsoft's "Step by Step series has had its hits - and not infrequent misses. On the whole, I have found the Step By Step books to run toward the superficial, which sometimes is acceptable and sometimes not. "Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step", however, is one of the best I've seen in this series to date.

Microsoft SharePoint is a complex platform. Newcomers get confused between the various incarnations of SharePoint. Further complicating matters are the interplay between SharePoint Designer and Microsoft's Visual Studio. Bottom line is the SharePoint universe is complex. Author Penny Coventry deals here with Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and what it does. She warns at the outset that the reader must have access to a server running Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Server 2007. I have seen reviews of this book criticizing the lack of a sample site on the accompanying CD. The author is clear that she does not provide the commercial software for this: if you want it, you have to buy it or otherwise have access to a running site.

Another issue is that this book is intended for the novice user of SharePoint Designer 2007, a product that has its roots in Microsoft's now discontinued Front Page 2003 product, which was intended exclusively for website design. SharePoint Designer is, in the final analysis, a programming tool with web design capabilities. Thus, the user with a programming background, especially in Visual Studio, who is looking for an introduction to SharePoint web design will be much more at home with the content of this book than will a web designer with no programming experience who is trying to learn about SharePoint itself.

If you have no experience in with SharePoint, programming SharePoint or web design, this is not the book for you.

Author Coventry, much to her credit, explicitly points out that SharePoint Designer actually has little usefulness for the average SharePoint worker. It is intended for the jobs that can't be accomplished using only a browser, but don't require the full power of Visual Studio. Ms. Coventry also maintains an excellent website in support of the book in particular and SharePoint in general. The URL is listed in the book.

With all those caveats and conditions out of the way, it's time to discuss the book itself.

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step" is unusually well done. Its flow is well designed, beginning with a detailed history of SharePoint Designer, some information on SharePoint and how it interacts with Designer. And then it is on to doing things using SharePoint Designer 2007. Once again the potential reader is warned: if you don't have access to a server running SharePoint, this book will be of little use to you.

Coventry does a good job of explaining how SharePoint Designer works. Much of what she says will be familiar to a large degree to someone with experience with web design tools like FrontPage or DreamWeaver, but the information about SharePoint will be new.

Overall, a solid introduction to SharePoint Designer, but make sure you already have some understanding of SharePoint and access to a SharePoint server before you pick this one up.

Jerry