SharePoint Designer Tutorial: Working with SharePoint Websites

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #100763 in Books
* Published on: 2008-07-20
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 188 pages
Customer Reviews

Great Jumpstart for Newcomers To SharePoint Designer4
SharePoint Designer Tutorial. SharePoint Designer Tutorial is a straightforward hands on book targeted at the SharePoint Designer novice looking for a frills approach to becoming productive with SharePoint Designer. Focusing on building a business site in SharePoint with the aid of Designer, SharePoint Designer Tutorial walks you through a series of hands on exercises that when followed from end to end will help you not only build a robust site but will furthermore help you gain the skills to re-use in extending your SharePoint solutions. Concise and to the point at 166 pages the book is a great jumpstart for anyone looking to get comfortable with SharePoint Designer.

Not sure who this book is for.2
Got this book to review to see if it was worthwhile for our end users, so my review is focused on that.

The book spends the first half going into basic what are the toolbars, what is HTML, CSS, etc. The stuff every new user book contains.
The examples are good, full of pictures and simple step processes. The examples are simple and make no real use of Sharepoint vs any web server, with the end result being a page for a wine company using master pages and displaying a table with wines and prices, hardcoded.
Good information for someone who wants to create their own pages above what the Edit Page provides.

After that it starts getting bad where the users are given examples where they need to install web parts and that they need to edit the web.config and configuring MS-Exchange. At that point we have passed the point of end user getting extra capability out for Sharepoint and gone into advanced computer user who have installed sharepoint, are familiar with web.config and other such configuration files.

Other bad items.

The previous wine page is gone and all example, like display the wine from a sharepoint list just do it to a blank page. There is a difference from making your site not look like Sharepoint to ignoring master pages and other functionaly that user expect from a Sharepoint page.
Workflows rate around 2 pages with a simple if this person edits an item send email but this is just shown not really exampled.
Example to display data are simple, with a simple example of conditional formating, xpath, and other items dealing with displaying data in lists.
There is no coverage about modifing the New form and Edit form for lists.

From the stand point of giving this to advanced end users and hoping I stop getting requests to do simple things like display a list with conditional formating I don't see this book helping them or me with that. The text and demos on the Microsoft site do a better job.