I am a community Alfresco user, but the difference in the products is minor and this is a book for both Community and Enterprise users.
The first chapter is about the structure and working of Alfresco. It gives a good overview of the product, what it is and how it works. I feel that a sign of a reasonable book if I am earning something in the first chapter and can honestly say what I did. There are some look diagrams that clearly and concisely show the structure and workings of Alfresco - the sort of things that should have been in the Alfresco documentation.
Yet found comments like "Alfresco now integrates with applications such as Facebook, ViewOne Pro,
and iGoogle, and gadgets such as iPhone." less than helpful since it gave little idea of what the integration was and how it benefits me..
The first chapter is certainly not for the faint hearted with the use of acronyms and general computer speak and lots of lists to read. Although I didn't really read them when reading the book, they are useful later when looking something up.
The second chapter is about installing Alfresco. Now I like many Alfresco users have managed to install the thing loads of times and are almost getting to stage of doing it in my sleep. I liked where the authors talked og Linux as the operating system of choice and then spent most of the chapter installing the product on windows. Having done both I think the installation under windows is easier but I still use a Linux system to run my Alfresco's on.The Linux installations does get a couple of pages on the installation but much is missed out.
The third chapter is about getting started and this is where the book got really interesting. The first part I noted was logging in as "http://localhost:8080/alfresco." rather than using share. I was really surprised that the authors decided to go back in time and use the old interface rather than using the new share interface to set things up. I understand that much still has to be done in the old environment, but I believe that they are selling Alfresco short.
In this chapter there are a lot of good things and some I learnt from rather than doing things the way I had always done them.
I have still much to read and comment on and this will be in the next part of the Blog.
