Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook Book Review

"Expert Cookbook" are the last two words in the title for a good reason. This book is for the advanced SharePoint developer. The book is a collection of small recipes that dig into some of the more advanced SharePoint 2010 programming topics. It does not mess around with introductions to topics, it just jumps right into the details of the solution. The book includes chapters on List and Event Receivers, Workflows, Advanced Workflows, List Definitions and Content Types, Web Parts, Web Services and REST, and Working with the Client Object Model. The author has made the code available for download. It is well organized and very usable, except for to old folders of code left in the upload. I just ignored them. You do need SharePoint 2010 on your Visual Studio 2010 development box. The books examples build on one another so the best way to read this book is from cover to cover. The author has a nice writing style so that is not difficult to do. I like that the examples where kept simple. It allows you to follow along and learn the technology, instead of having to learn the logic behind the sample. This also kept the sections of the chapters short and fast to read. The downside to this was that the examples were not all clean enough to be used as is. An example of this would be when the author shows you how to do list item validation and create a custom error page. The user is told they entered incorrect data, but then all the data they entered is lost without a chance to correct the mistake and resubmit. The thing I liked most about this book is that it get directly to the subject and stays there. It does not have a bunch of filler text and other non-sense that you find in a lot of books these days. I also liked the solutions presented worked. The downloadable code needed the expected changes, like URLs, but it worked. If you are a serious SharePoint 2010 developer, you should take the time to read this book. You can read more about it here and here.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook