Recently I have been reading the Sharepoint 2010 Developers Reference from Microsoft, written familiarise myself with some of the key points and even pick up a few bits of information I never knew.

The book then goes on to cover most of the major areas concerned with Sharepoint development such as web parts, both basic and advanced, customising the user interface, workflow and document management. The book even covers more complex areas that other books don't always cover such as programming the powerful in built search engine.

On the whole this book has been an excellent resource for me whilst working with Sharepoint and I would highly recommend even the most experienced developers grabbing a copy to use it for what the name suggests, a reference, and it performs this task extremely well.

In summary, this is a very comprehensive overview of development with Sharepoint 2010, however, even a book of this size can never dive deep enough in order to cover all of the technical aspects of a product as broad and complex as Sharepoint 2010. To be honest though, I have only had to open another book a couple of times with this book sufficing for virtually everything I needed in combination with the internet of course.

This is a great SharePoint book for developers and really does justice in covering product as big as SharePoint 2010. The author really knows his stuff and he explains it in a very fluent manner. One thing I particularly like about this book is writing style that keeps you engage from first to last chapter. Perhaps this is mainly because this book is written by a single author.

The chapters are very well separated and build good foundation to start with and then tackle the advance topics. Also the coverage of all the topics is very precise and without any unnecessary fluff. As SharePoint is a huge product I was not expecting every part of its functionality to be covered but there is enough in this book to take you from basic to advance level of SharePoint development. Also chapters are done in a way that by the time you finish a chapter, most likely you will want to really develop something based on the concept learned rather than waiting for next chapter, I found this very good while learning something really new.

Two things I notice missing are coverage of how to setup your SharePoint development environment and total absence of Visual Studio 2010. Other than these two points this book is perfect.