I bought this book and have spent time skimming most of it and reading a few select chapters. In my opinion, it is an awsome resource for someone that wants to jump right in to ASP.NET with some greate code examples. The books structure is very useful for developers as each chapters follows an Overview, Design, Code and Explaination, and Setting Up the Project flow. The book and accompanying examples do a good job of using nicely tiered architecture, however, datasets where used (at least in the examples I delved into) more than I would have preferred. I'm not big on datasets and tend to avoid them whenever possible. I highly recommend this book to and developer new to ASP.NET 2.0 looking for some example applications to get them up and running.

This review may sound more like a rant that a review, so I apologize to the authors in advance. I do not mean any disrespect toward the authors as they have each contributed in many ways to sharing knowledge regarding community server. However, this book falls short of reaching any expectations I had for it.

I read this book in just a few hours. As I stated above, this book was a real disappointment. It remains pretty high level and skims over the technical aspects of community server. The book is about three hundred pages with about 15 pages that I found valuable. The book reads like an administrator's manual written by a marketing department.

The books states that itis for both experienced developers and general enthusiasts. This is a bit misleading as I found this book almost completely lacking in any real developer oriented material. The last 5 chapters that are geared toward developers each contain a few useful tidbits of information, however, this same content can also be found on many websites and blogs already (including the authors websites). Experienced developers are accustom to digesting technical information and will find this book loaded with extraneous blabbering that has nothing to do with understanding, coding, or mastering the Community Server architecture.

This book was a waste of the $39.99 I paid for it and even after it's publication, as far as I'm concerned, Community Server remain a undocumented software product