pro sms 2003
The first thing I noticed about this book was the size: all of the Pro books I've read from Apress have been quite large and filled with every little detail of the topic they're covering. In contrast, Pro SMS 2003 barely breaks 200 pages. I really enjoy smaller books -- they're less intimidating while still containing all of the important information. But would Pro SMS 2003 live up to the Pro series? In some ways it did, but, unfortunately, it lacked in some areas.
The book is small enough to finish in a spare afternoon. A good third of the book is spent on preparing a new SMS environment and configuring it. After that, the book focuses on the main features of SMS: resource management, software deployment, software reporting, and Windows updates. The final chapters cover feature packs and third party tools.
There's definitely a lot of material packed into this small book, but I found it lacked a few things. The first was the installation of SMS itself. The book covered installing clients, secondary, and primary child sites, but there was nothing mentioned about the initial SMS server nor the management tools. Another topic I wish was covered more was WQL. There are an enormous amount of fields available to query and it could be overwhelming to a new user. Maybe something as simple as going over the most used fields would have been nice.
As short as it was, this book did a good job at covering SMS. I particularly liked the chapters on the feature packs and extra tools -- these things could easily never be discovered by some SMS administrators. On the other hand, I think there were some important topics left out and because of that, I'm going to dock it 3 points and give it a 7/10.
