Rating:  - A Waste of Your Money and Time
Without a doubt the worst technical documentation that I actually had to pay for. This book is one long self-indulgent testament to the developers and the community that has evolved around this product. Good for them, but as a technical manual it fails to deliver in any category: as a User Maunal, Administrative Guide, Programmer's Maunal or even just a Technical Reference. Worse, it hopelessly mixes this different kind of information together at the lowest levels.
Some of the other reviews allude to the high amount of "filler". The truth is though that this book is almost entirely filler; real content is scarce indeed. A staggering 54 pages are devoted to DotNetNuke and Shuan Walker's history when 2 pages would have covered it. Every tech-writer filler trick is used to get the books enormous page count(481). The pages are filled with enormous unannotated screen shots, long tables of program constants with little or no context to properly apply them and that staple of all modern bad programming documentation: extensive unannotated listings of the program's source code.
Save your money and your time on this one.
Rating:  - Refer to DNNs online Docs
There isn't much more in this book than is already available for free, to registered users, on the DotNetNuke website. I develop web based applications daily in DNN and barely, if ever, refer to this book. Register for a free account at the DotNetNuke website and consult the free documentation, of which this book is a regurgitation of, along with the forums.
Rating: - Re-Hash
Don't waste your money. All the information in the book is available for free download at the DotNetNuke site. Just download the 4.4.0 Docs package from the site and you will have then same information thats contained in the book. The only exception is that the infomation downloaded from the site is current. The docs download information is more comprehensive than the book. It goes into greater detail and gives better examples.
Rating:  - If you're going to work in DotNetNuke, you'll need it
The Pros:
I just began working in DotNetNuke and I wouldn't be able to get by without it. It provides an introductory explantion to how to use DotNetNuke and gets you up and running. There aren't a lot of DotNetNuke books out there, so keep that in mind.
The Minuses:
1) In order to justify the $39.99 price, it's obvious that the authors have added some fluff to make the book seem worth it. The content could have been covered in 200 pages (I could have read the history of DotNetNuke on the web site).
2) It's open source and is ever evolving. For example, I found that the module examples used in chapters 13-15 use a legacy version of the Events module, so if you do the standard install, the book won't match. By default, you can't install an older version over a new one in DotNetNuke, so you'll need to delete the Event folders, delete the Event tables and sprocs from the database and also delete the Event record in the DesktopModules table of the database. Then you can install the legacy version that will match the Wrox book.
3) The "professional" label. This book is definitely not advanced in nature the way that most of the Wrox "professional" series books are.
Rating: - Required Reading for New DotNetNuke 4 Users and Developers
This book is an indispensable resource in installing and configuring a DotNetNuke installation. The information is clear and easy to follow. My wife who is building her own web site using the application has been using the book to work through development items that were not clear from the application itself.
I am looking forward to using the back sections of the book to develop a couple of modules we will need to complete her web site.
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