Includes some useful bits of information, but this is not detailed enough to be a reference on Windows Installer, whilst not being good enough to be recommended as a tutorial.
It does contain references to other resources which are useful, but it barely touches on products that many people will use to create their MSIs in a commercial environment. As mentioned, it contains some useful bits of information, but it really doesn't give much advice on how best to design installers. In places where you think it is about to give advice, the language suddenly becomes really fuzzy, sitting on the fence rather than giving clear guidance. As for handling the minutiae of problems encountered in real deployment situations, such as how best to handle pushing out Microsoft redistributables to the Winsxs directory, don't even think about looking for definitive answers.
What it is good is that it touches on a range of subjects relating to how installers work. The language may be too fuzzy to be useful in itself, but by touching on those subjects and giving some references to other resources I found it at least gave me a nudge in the direction of the answers I was looking for. In reality, those answers usually came from the MSDN or elsewhere, but finding them was easier as a result of having read this book.
Certainly, based on reading this book and following references to other resources, I have not only developed MSIs, maintained MSIs developed by other people, but also written utilities to assist in deployment, particularly in the area of validating what is in MSIs and identifying which MSIs are installed on which servers etc.
So, not definitive, not a good tutorial, doesn't contain piles of good advice, but it does give you a taste of what an installer does internally, how to access those details both using tools such as Orca (which has proven very useful) and using your own code, as well as providing references to other, better resources. You could find this material using a search engine and MSDN, but if you like to do your reading from books, there is little alternative when it comes to Windows Installer than this book.
