The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide: Amazon.ca: Bob Baker: Books

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If you want to get your software officially blessed as Windows-compatible, you have to endow it with an automated installation routine. If your software is for Microsoft Windows 2000, you have to use the Windows Installer service. The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide is the best available treatment of the subject, and it's empirically quite good.

Author Bob Baker first walks readers through the installation-routine creation process the hard way--that is, with the Orca tool that ships with the Windows Installer Software Development Kit (SDK). He then delves much more deeply into the widely used InstallShield for Windows Installer (ISWI) product from InstallShield Software, at which company Baker works as an instructor. A demonstration copy of ISWI 1.52 (as well as the Windows Installer SDK) appears on this book's companion CD-ROM.

The Official InstallShield touches on several instructional techniques as it reveals aspects of the Windows Installer Service and of ISWI. Some of Baker's work is simple documentation of the ISWI user interface; other chapters are language documentation for InstallScript and its Component Object Model (COM) links.

The eclectic style of the book fits the subject, which is multifaceted and capable of dealing (almost by definition) with diverse configurations. Baker's careful, one-at-a-time exploration of features will help developers untangle problems they encounter. It's far better than the Windows Installer SDK documentation, no question about it. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Windows Installer Service and the process of creating installation wizards for programs that run on Microsoft Windows 2000, primarily with InstallShield Software's InstallShield for Windows Installer (ISWI). After covering Windows 2000's architecture for deploying software, this book documents the ISWI user interface and the essentials of its use. Custom actions, user interfaces, scripting, shared components, software patching, and localization are covered in turn.

Book Description

This authoritative guide shows how to create and deploy software applications using the new Microsoft Windows Installer Service (WIS) and the latest release of the industry-leading installation tool, InstallShield for Windows Installer.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
IN CHAPTER 4 AND 5 you saw how much work it was to create, by directly editing an MSI database, the installation package for a simple application consisting of only four files. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

21 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

2.2 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars DO NOT BUY THIS !, Feb 14 2004

By

Josef C. Tran (Westminster, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide (Paperback)

I unfortunately have this cursed book because of my ignorance. After reading it I became even more confused and used Install shield just as bad or even worse than before due to my greater confusion. I feel cheated and injured. Now I can't even sell it to get my money back. It's best to burn it and go on with my life. Most things in this book are Install Shield related but in a very round about way and just plainly splattered all over the place without any coherence to whatever you might be trying to do. It's like reading a book upside down with the pages in the wrong place. :) <--- before :( <--- after

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1.0 out of 5 stars Does anyone remember CalvinBall?, Jan 9 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide (Paperback)

If a dyslexic writer wrote a treatise on the U.S. tax code, it would read like this book.

My advice is that if you're an experienced programmer and the boss ever comes to you and asks if you'd take over the Installshield duties from the last person who (inexplicably) is no longer going to handle them, don't spend your money on this book -- put it directly into a new resume or job-hunting service.

PS -- CalvinBall was the favorite game of Calvin, from comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, in which Calvin simply did whatever he wanted, and pronounced that as the rules as he went.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Saved my skin, Nov 15 2002

By

Mock Duck - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide (Paperback)

With zero setup experience, I got conscripted for a rush job repackaging some spaghetti code legacy MSIs - I figured, they usually give this stuff to the junior folks, so how hard can it be? In three days I installed InstallShield and managed to completely trash my dev machine (it will no longer install *anything*). There are two problems with the free online MS/InstallShield documentation: it's structured as a reference, and it's not always correct (for example, on where to sequence nested MSIs, InstallShield 8 Help, MSDN, and support.microsoft.com give three different answers, some of them mutually exclusive - InstallShield was wrong).

Baker's book is not comprehensive but it provided a solid and cohesive foundation for an understanding of Windows Installer, and supplied me with the intuition necessary to guess the correct answer from ambiguous docs. It took three hours for me to skim this in a cafe, and has probably saved me at least three to five days of barking up the wrong tree.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Bloated and pointless
Though the author's writing style is clear and to the point, this is simply just another unnecessarily bloated, empty book for small-minded people who like the look of huge... Read more

Published on Nov 7 2002

1.0 out of 5 stars Worthless
After reading and re-reading this book for most of a year, I have yet to glean any useful information from it. Read more

Published on Nov 1 2002 by silvercitizen