Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed Book Review

This book covers a ton of topics. Actually more like 10 tons of topics. The book is broken down into 6 parts: Planning for and Deploying SharePoint Server 2010 Administering and Maintaining SharePoint Server 2010 Securing, Protecting, and Optimizing SharePoint Architecture Using SharePoint 2010 Technologies for Collaboration and Document Management Leveraging Office Applications with SharePoint Extending the SharePoint Environment Covering so many topics has its pros and cons. Pros include covering a wide variety of topics and they provide a lot of very helpful lists. Especially when comparing SharePoint 2010 Foundation, SharePoint 2010 Standard, and SharePoint 2010 Enterprise. The lists are one of my favorite features of the book. They include List of SharePoint 2010 Service Applications, Supported Direct In-Place Upgrade Targets for Various SharePoint Versions, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Search Federation in SharePoint 2010, Comparison of Legacy Versus RBS, SharePoint Server Role Resource Guidelines, Small Virtual SharePoint Environment Deployment Specifications, Comparison of Tools Available from the Home Page of the Central Administration, Site Collection Administration Tools in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise, Library and List Options in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise, Web Parts Available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, Document Library Settings Tools for Document Libraries, and Guidelines for Using Versioning, Page Approval Workflows, Content Approval, and Scheduling in Document Libraries. There are a ton more I could list, but I think I have made the point. These list really help give a quick glance into the features and tools available in a given area of SharePoint. The book also covers topics I have not seen covered elsewhere. It covers Protecting SharePoint with Advanced Antivirus and Edge Security Solutions, Virtualizing SharePoint Components, SharePoint Foundation Versus SharePoint Server, and Safeguarding Confidential Data in SharePoint. The chapter I found most useful so far was SharePoint Foundation Versus SharePoint Server. The biggest con is that the topics are not as in-depth as they need to be sometimes for field level use. An example would be the upgrade coverage. They cover a vanilla upgrade, but most upgrades are not going to go that smoothly. They list the security accounts needed but do not go into detail on how or where to use them. Another missing topic is setting up the secure store service. They mention it when covering Excel Services, but completely miss it when they discuss configuring PerformancePoint. They never cover how to configure it, and without it the services are useless. The cons do not really detract from the book because of the type of book it is. It covers far too much material to go into scenario based topics and I feel it goes in-depth enough to get you very familiar with the topics covered. The authors have made some of the code and the scripts available for download. Overall the book serves as a good introduction to a very wide variety of topics and goes to the level of depth needed to gain a thorough understand of the topic. All in all I recommend this book for anyone involve with SharePoint administration.