As noted in the previous post, I was offered a copy of “Blackberry Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange Installation and Administration” for review. This is the one published by Packt Publishing, written by Mitesh Desai and Dan Renfroe. I readily accepted the offer.
I was pre-disposed to like this book – I really was. I’ve worked with BlackBerry’s, and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), for quite some time; have written about them, and am a big fan of the devices, technology and platform.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Right off the bat, just looking at the book made me blink. It has a list price $44.99, and is currently available on Amazon.com for $41.03, yet it is only 166 pages of content, plus a couple of pages for the index, with an overall print quality – just flicking through the pages will tell you this – that looks like a systems administrator put this together one afternoon and printed it out on the office laser printer. And not a good, current laser printer either. The screenshots show this particularly well (and this is a “fully released” book, not an advance copy, in case you’re wondering).
Look, I know technical books “cost more”, but let’s keep things reasonable and in perspective, shall we?
So, on to actual content. The co-author and reviewer of this book are the same, and his biography is printed twice at the start of the book – sorry, but that’s sloppy reviewing and editing, and doesn’t really inspire me with confidence as to the rest of the book. And sure enough, now I’m at the table of contents, merely at page “ii”, and there’s a spacing error on one of the chapter titles. Petty? Trivial? Sure, on one level. But again – it’s an indication of the level of detail that has (not) been paid to this work.
Alrighty then, on to the real, actual content. No, I’m sorry – one more. Is it “BlackBerry”, or “Blackberry”? Yes, I know the correct answer, but it appears the folks behind this book don’t. At that point of discovery, I was tempted and inclined to stop reading the book, but I did feel obligated to continue.
So, in brief – there’s nothing in the meat of the content that isn’t already in the published RIM documentation, but there’s something to be said for having it bound together. Better quality screenshots would’ve been nice too. The text assumes you know nothing going in to this task – documenting, step-by-step, for instance, the creation of the service account and mailbox. I may have “big-company” fixation here, but I’d expect – or at least prefer – that my BES administrator already had that level of knowledge.
Look, bottom-line – if you’ve absolutely no experience with the BES, and have little to no knowledge with the underlying operating system, this probably would get you up and running – this is an “installation and administration” book, so don’t look too hard for anything in the troubleshooting area, which is a shame, because you definitely need that as well.
I wouldn’t purchase this book, and I don’t and won’t recommend it. Other opinions may vary, but this is mine. Sorry Packt.
Edited to fix typo – thanks Chris.
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I’ve been asked to review a book – Blackberry Enterprise Server for Microsoft Exchange, from Packt Publishing. I’ve done a fair bit with Blackberry systems, and my personal interpretation of the GTD methodology using a Blackberry is one of the most downloaded items I have on this site. So – having been asked, I’ll be interested to see the book when it gets here.
Great new feature from Jott though. A very handy service that I cheerfully recommend.
