InstallAnywhere Tutorial and Reference Guide

Rating:
Summary: Better than three days of training
Review: This book is an excellent guide to using InstallAnywhere no matter which platform you are running or how much experience you have with the product. This is the kind of documentation that you wish that the company would provide especially when you consider the price of the software. According to the introduction, the book was produced from the handouts that Zero G had produced for their three day InstallAnywhere course.

The book starts with a quick introduction and some screen shots showing what running an installer would look like from a customer's point of view. The authors next show a simple example of building an installer. Unfortunately, and this remains true for the rest of the book, no screen shots are included. This means that you must be running the software to take full advantage of the book. No reading this book in the bathtub. The book works well as both a tutorial and reference guide. The authors take you step by step through an exercise explaining each of the options even if they aren't used in this exercise. The instructions for each exercise are very clear. The use of the product is clearly explained while you are using it, which makes the learning "stick".

The book covers everything from the most basic installer all the way up to writing your own custom plug-ins. If you are interested in taking full advantage of the InstallAnywhere software and don't want to spend the money for three days of training, then this book is for you.


Rating:
Summary: Reduces the burden
Review: Usually the process of bundling together a software project along with an installation script is hurriedly done at the end of the project. And the scripts might differ for each target operating system. So you might think of InstallAnywhere as a meta-installer. The authors wrote the program to make installers under a gamut of operating systems - linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, XP etc. The hope is to free you from a lot of grungy operating system specific nuances that are probably not even the core expertise of you or anyone on your project.

In practice, even in this book, there are often unavoidable details specific to some operating systems. Like where to put files and resources. You will still have to contend with items like these. Still, the authors offer an intriguing and quite useful investment of your time. To the extent that it can relieve you of even some, if not most, of the installation details, it has merit.

As an added bonus, there is full internationalisation. You can run this program using text resources in many languages. As well as changing any localised text.