When deploying SharePoint, it is critical to plan for not only what you need now, but for how it will grow and scale down the road, especially when Document Management is involved. If you don't plan adequately for searchability, scalability, or disaster recovery, you can easily run into problems.

One criticism I have had of many SharePoint books is that they are written from a technical perspective and explain how to install and configure SharePoint, but they gloss over the critical planning stages or the best practices for scalability.

As the name of this book indicates, this is a very thorough guide covering the best practices for planning, deploying, optimizing, and organizing SharePoint. This book is not necessarily intended to give you step-by-step instructions for installing SharePoint, but rather cover the full lifecycle of a SharePoint deployment and give you best practice recommendations. The layout and organization of the book is very logical, making it easy to quickly find what you are looking for. It covers both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and MOSS 2007. It is written to be accessible by anyone on a team evaluating or implementing SharePoint, or anyone who just wants to learn more about it.

The book is broken into the following sections:

Introduction--includes an overview of the various SharePoint Technologies, how to determine which you need, and how SharePoint will help your business.

Part I--Planning--This is not just about planning for the IT infrastructure, but more about planning for the impact that SharePoint will have on your organization, such as dealing with push-back from users after moving away from shared folders to SharePoint document libraries and breaking down departmental "information kingdoms."

Part II--Building--This section gets into best practices for building your environment, including content management strategies, the role of custom development, and dev and test environments, including replication of content between environments.

Part III--Deploying--This section has a great discussion about organizing your content and search/crawling strategy to optimize searchability for your content, security of content, business intelligence, and intranet/extranet/internet deployment scenarios.

Part IV--Operating--This section has great tips on availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and performance monitoring.

What I appreciated most about this book is it is very readable and does not include a lot of "fluff," just straightforward best practices. For example, in Chapter 8, the section on should SharePoint replace file servers is very straightforward about the limitation of SharePoint and when file servers should still be used.

If you are someone new to SharePoint or a System Administrator charged with deploying SharePoint, this book may leave you wanting more--it is not designed to be a how-to book; however, it does include many good recommendations for additional resources.

My review may be biased, because I really enjoyed this book.
This book is well written and instead of directly heading to the technical aspects of Sharepoint, it goes and starts with the problems that are most likely to kill a Sharepoint project: change resistance, politics and conflict management.
However it doesn't stop there. The book digs deep into every aspect of a SharePoint project lifecycle from envisioning to deployment. This book is a must read for software architects.
PROS:
1) Full of effective recommendations on how to get the most of SharePoint.
2) Solid advice on how to manage SharePoint projects.
CON:
1)It may be overwhelming to new SharePoint players. If you are new to SharePoint consider reading the chapters relevant in each phase of the project.
2) If you are looking for technical depth and how-to practices, you won't find them here.

This is a Must-read for anyone in a SharePoint role. It is written for both technical personnel and business value reviews. Great strategic advice, insightful use of experience. Way to go, Microsoft Press! If this series continues as well written as this book, it should be awesome.

This was the only technical book I have ever read cover to cover. I found all of the information in here absolutely applicable and relevant to real-world implementation of SharePoint 2007. Ben Curry covers not only the best practices, but give examples of how these practices work in real companies. There are also mentions of "gotchas" and a number of excellently explained examples. He explains SharePoint-specific terminology and not only how to implement a particular feature of Sharepoint, but the WHY behind it.

This is definitely the book I wish I had when I first started using SharePoint. It is a compilation of all the topics that are continuously blogged about by all the experts.

A definite must-read for any SharePoint Administrator!

This is a must-have book for any serious SharePoint administrators. The topics are well laid out and the authors provide excellent explanations. Examples and authors insight into various topics are very valuable. I definitely recommend this book for any SharePoint Administrator during the early phases of any SharePoint implementation. The Best Practices suggested by the authors would definitely help you to deploy a successful SharePoint solution.

The Companion CD contains sample project plan, project charter, DDoc etc that are very useful to SharePoint Administrators.

This book is fantastic for individuals who understand SharePoint, and the normal SharePoint practices, but want more in-depth tips, tricks, and best practices written by two guys who have plenty of real-world experience.

There are plenty of suggestions for ensuring you are getting the most out of your SharePoint 2007 installation.

The book is well-written, easy to read, and more importantly, easy to understand.
It also contains a CD with lots of utilities and helpful documents that can be used in your own SharePoint environment.

I highly recommend you buy this book, as it explains a lot of areas in SharePoint that sometimes are confusing, and it also contains real-world tips and tricks that you can implement to ensure your SharePoint installation is running optimally.

Thanks and great job guys!