At the beginning of 2010, the community was exited about the news, that Packt Publishing was about to release a new book covering Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1.
A lot of people were asked to write a review and so was I. It took a while for the book to make it to my desk. Not sure what causes the delay. Geeta Sanganee kindly sent me an electronic copy in addition to the printed copy.
The book is written by Tim Speed, Barry Rosen, Joseph Anderson, David Byrd, Brad Schauf, Bennie Gibson and Dick McCarrick.
The main content is written on 250 pages devided into 10 chapters. That’s only 25 pages for each chapter. The rest of the 335 pages is used for the index, appendix, preface, an “About the authors” and a chapter that covers “Third party products”.
The contents of the “About the authors” pages reminds my of an Acadamy Award night where the actors say thank you to loads of people or an end title that is sometimes longer than the actual movie.
“Third party products” ? Well, it is good to know that there are products that will add features to Lotus Notes and Donino that are not included in the core product. But I would not expect to find the contents of vendor flyers in a book I have to pay money for. They simply do not belong there and the wasted space should have been used to provide more useful information about the core product.
The book pretends to be written for
… Lotus Notes power users, administrators and developers working with any version of Lotus Notes / Domino who want to upgrade to Lotus Notes /Domino 8.5.1.
I doubt that the targeted audience will be totally satisfied. I did not find any tipps or hints that have not been discussed in forums, wikis, technical articles and presentations from national or international conferences.
IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 – Upgrader’s guide … The upgrade process itself is desribed in chapter 6 which goes from page 115 – 133. This is way to little to discuss all the aspects of a successful upgrade from “any version of Lotus Notes / Domino”.
I would not recommend this book to an experienced administrator or geeky developer.
Administrators will not find version specific information when upgrading from version 6.5 to 8.5.1 for example. Developers would expect code. Code is not provides with this book, except the “DCT Export sample” on page 127 and some lines of LotusScript and Java code fragments on page 278 and 279-281.
If you want to get a comprehensive enumeration of new and improved features of release 8.5.1 and do not want to search for this information on the internet, than this book is the right choice for you.
I have been asked by Packt Publishing to review a new book titled
Development.
Das zumindest behaupten die Autoren des Buches “Generation Doof” ,Stefan Bonner und Anne Weiss.