Recently I had the opportunity to read the book Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook. The authors of the books are Samuel Erskine, Steven Beaumont, Anders Asp, Dieter Gasser and Andreas Baumgarten and two of them are even MVPs which infers for the quality of the book.
The book is divided in 11 chapters. The chapters are structured in a way that when you read the book you will start from more beginners to more advanced information. In the book you will find description and practices examples for all the features of System Center Service Manager 2012. In fact the bigger part of the book contains mini guides on how to do certain tasks in order to administer and manage the product. These mini guides are so detailed and explained well that you can build your own test environment and implement the steps in the book while reading it. This is useful because the easiest way to learn a product is to interact with it, to find out how all its features works by testing them.
The audience of this book is mostly people who currently start using or plan implementation of System Center 2012 Service Manager. The book will be also suitable for people who know different parts of SCSM 2012 but do not know the full power of the product. Before actually reading the book I would suggest to prepare yourself with a little Technet material about SCSM 2012. The authors didn’t include any information that already exists over Internet, instead they’ve included links to it. This gives uniqueness to the book.
Because Service Manager is a big product almost all of the chapters describes the basics of every feature but the book manages to show what are the capabilities of these features if more advanced techniques are implemented. This is good because you when you want to achieve something more advanced you will know if it is achievable and where to look for additional information in order to achieve it.
I definitely recommend this book to engineers who just start with System Center 2012 Service Manager or to more advanced users of this component part of System Center 2012 family.
You can find the book in the following online stores:
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 
3 thoughts on “Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook – Book Review”