Great book on the more advanced configuration capabilities in SharePoint 2003

I just finished browsing through a new book on advanced SharePoint customizations:

SharePoint 2003 Advanced Concepts: Site Definitions, Custom Templates, and Global Customizations By Nadrowski, Jason/ Draper, Stacy Published by Addison-Wesley, Microsoft Windows Server System Series ISBN: 0321336615; Published: 3/13/2006; Copyright 2006; Pages: T; Edition: 1

Check the link for an example chapter.

It is a small book (247 pages) that has great focus. I hate those 1000 pages books that pretend to cover everything, but only scratch the surface on a zillion topics. This book its focus in on creating site definitions, and it does this well with a lot of valuable tips and good examples. It covers some other topics as the backcover mentions:

· Construct more powerful site and list templates

· Control how SharePoint uses ghosted and unghosted pages

· Use custom site definitions to gain finer control over your site

· Build list definitions with custom metadata, views, and forms

· Troubleshoot WEBTEMP, ONET.XML, SCHEMA.XML, SharePoint databases, and their interactions

· Create custom property types to extend SharePoint's functionality

· Integrate with other systems and SharePoint sites so that you can use their information more effectively

· Change themes and edit Help, one step at a time

· Customize email alerts and system notifications

· Extend the capabilities of document libraries

· Control document display and behavior based on extensions

Most information is also available from other sources like the SharePoint SDK documentation, articles on MSDN and blog entries, but here you get a good written, easy read that gets you into the topic in a matter of hours.

Highly recommended if you need to get up to speed quickly on the topic, and don’t really care to spend a few bucks. But don’t take only my words for it, always check Amazon for the latest reviews.