Two books have just come across my desk, as courtesy from Microsoft Press. Microsoft Office SharePoint Best Practices and MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit Windows Presentation Foundation.
Obviously I looked at the SharePoint one first. I am a MindSharp Authorized Trainer and so am not completely independent, but I must admit that I came to the book with considerable skepticism. I already add a lot of best practices from my consulting experience into my classes and so expected to be frustrated by dogmatic opinions that were formed simply by different experience. The book was much more reasonable and less prescriptive than I feared, I would not take every statement as gospel, and obviously there are differences this side of the Atlantic, but it is an excellent start to planning a SharePoint project and is a book that is sorely needed. Pity is has no index.
The Training kit for WPF was especially interesting to me since I had been doing technical writing for Microsoft for much of NET 3.5 but I had concentrated mostly on WCF and WF. This book is fine for its purpose, the style is dry and factual. It does have an index. Not that I wish to be pedantic about indexes, I am preparing an 600 page+ book for publication this year and I might not get a chance to add an index either!
