Book review: SMS 2003 Recipes

SMS 2003 Recipes by Greg Ramsey and Warren Byle

As always, a long way behind the rest of pack on this one. The books been out for several months but I just picked it up, and thought i'd write up a quick review here.

Each chapter is neatly devoted to a particular function of SMS.

The chapters are:

• Getting Started
• SMS Site Administration
• Collections
• Packages\Programs
• Advertisements
• Software Metering
• Reporting, Queries
• Software Inventory
• Hardware Inventory
• Remote Tools and Remote Assistance
• Software Distribution
• Software Updates
• SMS Status Messages and Logs
• SMS Advanced Client
• Building a Virtual SMS lab
• Additional SMS Tools.

As you can see, the chapters pretty much cover the entire product.

The first chapter gets you in to the swing with scripting, the tools required (notepad & a CMD prompt!) some info on Packaging (SMS Installer, Macrovisions AdminStudio) and external resources (books, newsgroups, Online communities, et al). All very handy information for those new to the world of SMS, or those that have pretty much supported SMS in isolation, and haven't fully reached out and discovered all the resources that are out there on the WWW.

I really like this book. It gets very technical where needs be, with overviews, explanations, then dives straight in to how to do the work using either GUI's or via scripting methods. The source code examples are good examples of how to get the job done the right way, and are perfect examples to grow you're skills from. And, the authors have gone to great lengths to explain each subject touched upon, in easy to digest parcels of knowledge. Very unlike most of the Microsoft documentation, which can be a nightmare to comprehend, and usually bloated to several paragraphs when one will do!). Good job guys.

For me, I personally will use this book as a scripting reference.

By Apress (www.apress.com) ISBN 1-59059-712-5

If you are going to start scripting, you can just use notepad and go from there. But if you need to debug then it can become quite an effort, relying on WScript.Echo's everywhere to track process flow. Go take a look at Script Debugger IDE, its on a 30day eval but gives you a taste of an IDE for VBscript (akin to Visual Studio). Once you go beyond using the source code from the book (which is also online at the apress website), you'll really benefit from having a debugger. Google the subject, lots of debuggers out there, always eval them, rather than falling for the websites\authors claims, as a lot fall short.

I'll go buy some more books, and do more reviews. There is one guy I know, who is obsessed with collecting ANY SMS book .. our resident SMS guru David Scambler. I might try and pry some of his prized possessions off him for more reviews.