Exploring with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 Brief (Exploring Microsoft Office 2007) [Spiral-bound]

I have mixed feelings about this book. First off it is well written, it is in color, has lots of examples, covers all of the design concepts of creating and customizing web pages, all of this is well done. It is organized as a training guide or textbook for a class on web design.

But... this is not a book about SharePoint! This book is about creating web sites using SharePoint Designer 2007 (SPD) as a tool. This book does not cover integration and manipulation of SharePoint elements within SP Master or Layout pages, it does not cover using SPD to brand SP sites, setup SP custom pages with Web Part Zones and Web Parts, create workflows, or customize ListViews and DataViews. It does not cover the kind of subjects most SP developers or designers are looking for.

So while this book is an excellent training guide for building and customizing web pages, it does not address the deeper needs of the SP developer or designer.

Although this book is well written and illustrated, I would not recommend it for anyone interested in learning how to design or author content for a SharePoint environment. Basically, the authors took the content for an Expression Web training manual and attached the SharePoint Designer name. The title more accurately should be SharePoint Designer 2007 Ex-ploiting!

This book is intended as a text. I dearly hope that students are not compelled to purchase it because it is a waste of money. First, the book focuses on using SharePoint Designer as an enhanced replacement for Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Twenty-one pages are expended in an introduction that makes Academy Award acceptance speeches appears as paragons of modesty. The creator (Grauer) and author (Marghitu) extend their appreciation to practically everyone in academia. They then explain all the "special features" of the book's design. All these special features are actually a forewarning: the book is a visual mess with call-outs, pull-quotes and typographical design that only an art critic could love. It is an ugly, disoriented mess.

The author tries to explain everything there is to know about the internet and its technologies - and fails miserably.

The copy is disjointed with frequent excursions into unrelated areas. For example, this gem under the heading of "Accessible Web Pages Using CSS Styles": "Some users have browsers that do not support style sheets, an some users turn off style sheets or need to apply their own custom style sheet. Therefore, develop Web pages that are comprehensible and usable without style sheets". There is nothing in the chapter about accessibility (which is treated as a separate chapter later - and has no relation to SharePoint) and nothing is explained about how to create sites based on style sheets but are usable without style sheets.

Obviously, the nudge toward accessibility is one of those politically correct tidbits that academics are so fond of. Incidentally, the "case study" in this chapter is of several very recent (three years) female college graduates who have built a thriving real estate business. All of their employees are also successful young females.

Anyway, if you can navigate the awful design, comprehend the convoluted and often incomplete copy, you might actually learn how to design an almost primitive website running on SharePoint.

But there are many other books on the same subject which are far better, far more authoritative, cover the subject in greater detail and are priced lower. I suggest you avoid this one.

Jerry