Customer Reviews & Comments
If you are new to InfoPath, do yourself a favor and get this book first. In fairness to prior books, writing a book on InfoPath really was not an easy or pleasant task before Service Pack 1 came along. Before SP1, InfoPath was a less useful product that required more effort to understand and use for real-world solutions. The book is well organized and follows a logical progression from basic to more complex subjects. The first 60% or so of the book covers the basic matter with the remainder devoted to more advanced and quite current topics such as using .NET managed code with InfoPath. Lastly there is a case study to illustrate the thought processes around using InfoPath in real-world solutions. If you need to get up-to-speed on InfoPath quickly, this book can be lightly read in no more than 2 days and used as a guide and reference from there. There are two aspects about the way this book is written that appealed to me. First, Scott Barker makes practical use of the "Try It Out" and "How it works" technique. Second, any prior bleeding-edge experience with InfoPath, especially pre-SP1, will make anyone purchasing this book totaly appreciate the expanded coverage of topics like security and deployment. InfoPath was designed to comply with standards/laws that address privacy like HIPPA, which make deployment "lots of fun". On the downside, there are a number of typos in the book, but my guess is that the editing done by Wrox was rushed and it's not due to the writing per se. Fortunately, the errors are pretty obvious.