This is the first episode of SharePoint Book recommendation series, which intends to introduce some best SharePoint books. If you are author, or know some good books, please feel free to contact us. We are honored to present those books on our blog.
For Dummies, published by John Wiley & Sons, is an extensive series of instructional and referential books. Among them, Business Statistics for Dummies and HTML5 for Dummies are my favorites. I do not count myself as a dummy though J, yet For Dummies series books gave me unintimidating and easy-to-understand guides in subjects that are of interest to me.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Dummies is the first book that I used to embark on my SharePoint 2010 quest. As usually, this book provided me with an easy ride to SharePoint 2010 world, and it is still my reference book when I encounter some obscure concepts.
Granted, SharePoint 2010 for Dummies is not for experienced developers or for those who require deep knowledge of SharePoint. If you need some comprehensive books on SharePoint then this book is not for you.
With SharePoint 2010 for Dummies, you will learn to, quote from the book, understand the complexity of SharePoint, use wiki and team site for collaboration, as well as use tags, metadata and search.
This book has six parts focusing on different entry level topics. The first part is collaborating with team site, introducing lists, views, alerts and, of course, team sites. Those are the nuts and bolts of SharePoint even for SharePoint end users, and we are literally dealing with them every day.
The second part is taking your team site into the next level. This part introduces you how to configure some easy parts of SharePoint such as libraries and lists, to fit special needs. Following that is an introduction of how to work with web pages, web parts and others.
With this fundamental knowledge under your belt, we can wear our webmaster hat from now on. In the third part, for those being entitled to put on the webmaster hat, this book introduces portals and sites. And some essentials like how to publish content, change page layouts and so forth.
The next part is about SharePoint branding. It teaches how to change the look and feel of SharePoint. This part references a number of HTML and CSS codes in addition to Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer- the standard customization tool of SharePoint.
Then comes the enterprise service, the crown of SharePoint. SharePoint is an enterprise platform, thus knowing how to use it in the context of an enterprise is what we should know. This part covers content type, metadata, and enterprise search and business intelligence as well.
The last part in this book provides some recommendations for further reading. There are twenty items listed : ten governance items and ten ways to master SharePoint.
About the author
Vanessa L. Williams has more than a decade of experience in information technology and information systems. As a freelance consultant, she helps clients use SharePoint to solve business problems. She is also the author of SharePoint 2007 For Dummies.
You could get this book from various books stores as well as Amazon, Google Book Store and others.
Disclaimer: BoostSolutions and its employees have no relationship with the book authors, publishers or book stores mentioned in our blogs.