Building the SharePoint User Experience

by Bjørn Furuknap

Book Overview

It was a dark autumn night when private investigator AJ was sitting in his office, looking f- ward to the next day's bottle of bourbon. He wasn't much looking forward to anything; rather, it would be more correct to say he hated his life a little bit less when he got a few shots of bo- bon. Today's bottle was empty, and reality had started to crawl up his spine. You may very well wonder what this has to do with SharePoint. The answer is absolutely...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1430218967
• ISBN13: 9781430218968
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very useful SharePoint book

This book is unlike any other SharePoint book I have ever read. It is not a giant bible but an easy to read information packed summary and overview of all the issues that SharePoint developers need to know if they are not happy with their MOSS sites looking like the OOB product. If you ever need to do any sort of User Interface customization in SharePoint, start with this book. The information provided here is also scattered in bits and pieces all over blogs, MSDN articles and who knows where else, so having it in one place is fantastic.

The Philosophy of SharePoint

This author is always described as 'unique' by his peers and I often say that he is not just a developer but a philosopher. If you enjoy thinking deeply about how your work as a developer ultimately impacts the end user, then Bjorn is the guy you want to learn from.

Useful book, great style of writing, only few minor problems

I have been designing SharePoint based solutions from the last six years. I actually pre-order this book as I liked author's style of writing. Bought his periodicals from [...] and found these good reading. First, author has great ability to explain concepts in plain English. He is a developer who understands his stuff and has learned by exploring and experimenting things. Hence, has more clarity of concepts. Second, he has shown how to use these concepts into development. This makes it much easier to understand the concepts and their applicability. There are few minor problems that I have noticed: (1) Book title is misleading and doesn't reflect the true nature of the book. (2) The chapters' name are again fun to read the first time but then you wonder which chapter covers what later. This becomes annoying when you need to find a particular information as a reference. (3) The screen shots in the book appears a bit small and sometimes require more close attention to understand. In spite of these minor issues, overall a great book to have in your collection. I would highly recommend this book and also his periodicals.

An Excellent Look At Some Of The Deeper Workings Of SharePoint

This book does a great job of covering topics that are very close to how end users interact with SharePoint. I have been working with/developing for SharePoint since 2003. As I was reading the book I was reminded of many problems I had faced in the past and struggled to solve. This book went deep into the inner workings of SharePoint and showed me how I could build reusable, professional solutions to very common SharePoint problems. This is content that I have not come across in other SharePoint books or MSDN articles I have read. You can tell that the author has real working knowledge of SharePoint, and he passes that on to you.

A Deep Dive into SharePoint Development, like few others I've found

I've been developing with SharePoint for around 2 years now, initially mainly in the worfklow area, and now more recently in more content-focussed SharePoint development. One of the things I had noticed about so many SharePoint books is that they seemed, to put it bluntly, derivative. Many seemed to reproduce re-hashes of a single original MSDN based example, and stuck to a very narrow set of stepping stones when covering a particular facet of SharePoint. Most recently I've been doing Custom Field Type development, and had come across a few sticky issues that I wanted guidance on. Once again, the majority of the articles and book entries on this topic were quite similar, and generally derived directly from the Microsoft SDK. In short they seemed to give little further insight. After reviewing the sample chapters of this book and its table of contents, it looked like a book that was a bit different to the others I described above. And after reading it thoroughly, my first impressions and expectations have been confirmed, and in many cases exceeded. It steps off the beaten track and answers those "Yes, but what about ..." type questions that seem to be left unanswered in the majority of books. This one takes that next step, and enhances your deep understanding of the topic. His coverage of Custom Field Types and Content Types is particularly good. In summary, I've found the book to be one of the best genuine deep-dives into SharePoint development I've found, and highly recommend it (I should emphasize despite the title, it is primarily a *developers* book, not a *designers* book). The author states on his blog relating to the book, that his aim was to "Create the best SharePoint book ever". Certainly a lofty aspiration, and I'll be interested in others opinions. I think he's gone pretty close!