microsoft

Don Jones deserves applause for clearly covering all the major areas of the vast Windows Server 2003 package in this easy-to-handle book. It steers the middle course between the vast "Mastering <topic>" tomes, and the near-useless "Dummies" approach. It lives up to its promise of teaching you what you need to know to start setting up and managing a Windows 2003 server with about 15 hours of investment in reading time.

The only thing keeping it from getting a full five stars was that it went a bit too briskly over DNS, where I get the feeling a couple more pages of Jones' on-the-mark advice could have saved me some hours of troubleshooting. On the whole, however, a very useful book.

I bought this book along with about 5 other much bigger books. Some had over 1200 - 1700 pages. This book only has about 400 pages and it makes it so easy to get you up to speed. Very nicely written. Very deliberate. No stupid "Dummies" humor. I love it! For instance, it explained Active Directory in only minutes and made it real easy. It also explained that if you wanted to go deeper - buy another book about it. So it's not a pretentious book. Very straight forward and to the point. I highly recommend this book if you already have reasonable Windows knowledge and quickly want to fill in the blanks for Windows Server 2003. Again - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I was looking for a book that would give me a crash course on what's new in Windows 2003, but this book is just a crash course for someone who doesn't know anything about Windows. Maybe that's what it's supposed to be, so I guess I just missed the point, but this one got returned.