‘Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint’ Available on Amazon

The jQuery and SharePoint book we’ve been working on over the last few months, Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint, is finished and available in the Kindle Store at Amazon. The book features information about how to use jQuery and real solutions that power users or developers can implement without any deployment to SharePoint servers.

Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint

Mark Miller (Editor), Mark Fidelman (Foreword), Marc D. Anderson (Author), Dave Coleman (Author, Wendy Neal (Author), Ben Tedder (Author), Paul Tavares (Author), Eric Overfield (Author), Josh McCarty (Author)

One cool thing about this book is that it was a community project, headed up by Mark Miller (@EUSP) of EndUserSharePoint.com. It was fast tracked and delivered in a three-month timeframe, when most books can take upwards of a year or more to come to fruition. By divvying out the writing to seven different authors, Mark could concentrate on coordinating the project and the publishing details. Mark was excellent at herding all the authors and making sure deadlines were met. Well, he was excellent at herding the others; I’m difficult.

Another cool thing is that we used private Yammer groups to manage the overall project and the reviewing process for each of the chapters. We invited outside reviewers using or favorite social media channels, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and SPYam (also Yammer-based). Using the Yammer groups, we were able to share our ongoing writing and get quick feedback from the reviewers who volunteered.

Once again, I’d like to thank the community reviewers who helped me proofread and refine my chapter. Their suggestions made it a far more interesting piece of work, and I firmly believe it is much more valuable based  on their input. So a huge THANK YOU goes out to (in no particular order):

  • Rainer Wittmann
  • Landon Bass
  • George Winters
  • Alexey Krasheninnikov
  • Kevin Coetzee
  • Luis Valencia
  • Lisa Davis
  • Edin Kapic
  • Stefan Kiessig
  • Scott Rooke
  • Sébastien Levert
  • Harold Gale
  • Bart Towery
  • Russell Gove

We’re hoping that this is only the first in a string of books using this approach for EUSP Press. Let Mark Miller know if you have other ideas for books that you think the SharePoint community would appreciate.

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22 Comments

    1. Joe:

      We wanted to appeal to the widest audience and also write about real solutions that have worked for us.

      While 2013 (or Office365) is getting all of the press, 2010 still makes up the lion’s share of installations out there. Personally, I still do a lot of 2007 work. It doesn’t make much sense to only target the current release.

      The solutions that each author chose to write about have been proven in real world situations. They aren’t just book demo stuff. Because of this, they have mainly been running in 2007 and 2010 environments over the last several years.

      Finally, this type of development tends to move across versions quite well. I’ve seen very few upgrade problems with the jQuery solutions I’ve built, though like anything, testing and adjustments are always required. I’d be willing to bet that the solutions in the book are equally movable across versions, even backward.

      M.

    2. I’ll add on to your Response Marc and specifically the comment on “…this type of development tends to move across version quite well”…
      I can confirm that my chapter, “Create a Team Site Solution for Running Agile Projects”, can be applied to SharePoint 2013. I did that recently and noticed only minor cosmetic issues.
      Paul.

      1. I just used ShareGate to clone my SPTechCon demo from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. Other than some poor file placement on my part, it too was painless.

        M.

  1. I bought the book and intend to read and try out cover to cover. ;-)
    One problem though, when copying from Kindle, there are a lot of extra spaces that are breaking the JavaScript.
    Can you publish the sources as plain text somewhere (or sent a file to your customers :-) )

    Thank you, cool book!

  2. Marc, I went to a couple of your classes last week at SPTechCon. I learned alot, so I’m very excited to see this book. However I’m having problems with one of the first examples. I tried the collapsing Quick Launch (I know you didn’t write this chapter), but it’s not working. I noticed that when I used the script to test if the initial call is working, the alert displays ' in the message. I changed that in the code to an actual apostrophe and it worked fine. So I noticed in the QuickLaunch code there is ' in a number of places. Do I need to change that to an actual apostrophe to get it to work? And why is there ' everywhere?

    1. I think I figured it out. I was viewing the code through the Amazon website, so I think the page was rendering it as $apos;, when in actuality it was an apostrophoe. When I went to the actual drop box files, it had an apostrophe. Once I changed my code, it worked like a charm.

  3. Hi Marc, love the book but I’m getting 404s for the tiny.cc urls. Is there an updated location to get code? I’m building out the Agile site. I realize the book was published a couple of years ago but hopefully the Dropbox location is still active? Thanks!

    1. Joyce:

      I can check on this for you, but like you say – it’s been a few years. We wrote the book with Mark Miller and I think the code samples were n EndUserSharePoint.com, which no longer exists in its original location. Is it Paul Tavares’ chapter you’re working with?

      M.

    2. Hi Joyce…
      The Agile solution was my chapter and yes, the links are not currently working – as Marc stated, they were broken when EndUserSharePoint.com was moved to a new home.

      Here is a link that you can use to download the code for my chapter:

      https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9FAtRRmqU-Aakt1SUhLMVM1THpaQjlTR2hfOVhmVTBXUnYw/view?usp=sharing

      (FYI: I’ll probably be releasing a Web APP for SharePoint for a similar solution some time this year)

      /Paul

      1. Love your book! Excellent stuff! Question – What’s a URL for where the code is that works? Neither the tiny url or the url that Paul provided work.

        1. @Janice:

          Frankly, that code may have scattered to the wind at this point. I believe it was on the original EndUserSharePoint.com site, which has migrated and morphed several times since. Are you looking for something specific?

          M.

          1. Thanks, Marc. Yes, I’m looking for the codefor the various html, css, and others that are in Paul Tavares Agile chapter 7 of the book. Am hoping I don’t have to manually recreate those myself.

        2. @janice,
          The link above is working and is for the code provided with the solution detailed in the chapter I wrote… I just clicked on it and was able to download it from the button available at the top-right of the Google drive page.

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