Once again, this is another surprisingly good book (don't miss the "DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide").
I thought "here we go again" when I saw the long preamble by Shaun Walker, but far from being a self-indulgent outpouring it turned out to be a fascinating and important inside look at the emergence of this significant application on the Microsoft platform. Emergence is all about "coordination and cultivation" rather than "command and control". Just look at what Cisco are up to. This chapter brings those words to life. I was particularly impressed by Microsoft, who planted IBuySpy (the seed of DotNetNuke) in the fertile soil of ASP.NET, left obvious gaps in the application for others to fill, watered the seedling with a generous EULA, and the way Scott Guthrie gave of his time but did NOT give Shaun Walker financial support. If anyone wants to know how the emergence of eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Firefox and so on, came about there are plenty of clues here.
The book is technically excellent and covers installation (always a mental block) well. If I have a complaint it is only that I had to buy this book to get a full account of how the new Module Manifest works. Charles Nurse dribbled it out over six blog entries, but you have to buy this book to get almost the whole story ("Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming" gives you more). But, hey, they want to sell books.
Another generic criticism, perhaps unfair to level at these authors alone, nevertheless something they and Wrox should think about, is that the book glosses over some of the human issues in applying this technology. For example, choice of Profile Properties has legal and moral implications. European legislation on Data Protection requires that User's give "unambiguous consent" to the way their data is used (see Goldsmith and Wu's excellent "Who Controls the Internet?" elsewhere on Amazon). DotNetNuke's Profile Visibilty options go a long way to meeting that requirement, but this is never explained in the text.
Still a great book. Well done folks.