In their recently released new version, Microsoft has significantly improved SharePoint and made it more complex--the software presents new challenges to both developers and administrators. Malik’s book meets the challenge of writing a timely, intermediate-level book that isn’t too convoluted.

As the author admits, SharePoint 2010 is too vast a topic to exhaustively cover in one book; still, he does a good job of covering many important aspects of the release. Considering that Malik has authored a number of books on .NET and the SQL Server architecture, he is in a good position to cover the extensive and integrated aspects of SharePoint 2010.

This medium-length book--about 365 pages and an index--follows a logical progression, with most of the widely used features stacked at the beginning. Given the complexity of the development environment and the book’s aim to cover many of the features in a limited space, Malik explains, in chapter 1, some of the alternative settings of a practical development machine. He covers typical development, integration, quality assurance (QA), and production environments, before focusing on his own virtualized development machine.

Chapter 2, “SharePoint Basics,” indicates how the SharePoint installation leads to particular configurations on the development workstation. It then briefly introduces the central administration site and the SharePoint organization hierarchy. The chapter ends by introducing SharePoint lists, which are the architecture’s basic building blocks.

Starting with chapter 3, Malik addresses the development features of the solution framework. As I mentioned before, most projects will involve the majority of the features presented in the chapter, so the reader may have to read the material a few times. From the definition of WebParts to writing the first sandboxed solution, farm solution, and proxies decisions, the chapter covers a lot of ground, illustrated through an example from start to finish. From chapter 3 onwards, the author provides code--downloadable from the publisher’s Web site (http://apress.com/book/view/9781430228653)--that increases the usefulness of the book. Together, the examples represent more than 24 megabytes (MB) of code, allowing the developer hands-on experience while reading the book.

Chapter 4 goes into more detail about WebParts and SharePoint pages. Chapter 5 presents the development of WebParts and pages on the client side, with the client object model, ADO.NET data services, and custom Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. In the next two chapters, the focus switches to organizing data into SharePoint, with detailed coverage of content types and the various ways of storing and querying the data, using either Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) or language-integrated query (LINQ).

Chapter 8 delves into the major topic of enterprise document management, showing how SharePoint 2010 fits this purpose. Then, the author dives into various records management features, such as recordization, auditing, eDiscovery, holds, and retention policies. Chapter 9 demonstrates business connectivity services and its improvement over the SharePoint 2007 business data catalog. Chapter 10 familiarizes the reader with the basic concepts of authoring and using SharePoint workflows. In chapter 11, the author talks about the numerous SharePoint features that belong to the business intelligence spectrum. The last chapter closes the book with security, an important topic that needs to be addressed from the ground up.

While it is difficult to render justice to the numerous new features of SharePoint 2010, Malik’s lucid and timely attempt covers the essential facets that are important to developers. The book and the associated code have a definitive place in the developer’s portfolio, as a stepping-stone to SharePoint 2010. Malik’s style is engaging, and the informative material often hides the fact that SharePoint is not easy to master. Readers should be mindful that, since SharePoint 2010 is a big topic, even the best book would only be an introduction to the various aspects of its composite environment; hence, this book is only the start of a long journey.