We're a good few weeks away from the first Visual Studio Team System books landing on bookshelves. There's "Working with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System" from Microsoft Press out already, but really this is the marketing material for the product repackaged as a book for project managers, and relatively content free. Wrox and Apress are both due to have their Pro series, aimed at developers, out around the same time (May/June) but Apress appear to have taken a slight lead by launching their "BetaBook" service which currently has two chapters from their book available, with more becoming available as they're ready. The idea is that you purchase a Beta book for $25 (about half the bookshop price for the paper version) and get early access to the material (weekly updates I believe) with the final version being available in download pdf form when all's done. For those working on "the bleeding edge" this is an attractive option.
The fact that there are only two chapters, both at the "introductory" level, is a little disappointing, given that the book is scheduled to be fully ready for download in about four weeks time, but hopefully things will accelerate as the publication date gets closer.
The first available chapter (Chapter 1) is an introductory 14-page overview of Team System, which I think most of those working on "the bleeding edge" will already be well familiar with. In its favour, it does manage to convey a better sense of what VSTS is and why you'd want to use it in its slim 14 pages than the Microsoft Press book managed to do in its nearly 300, and extremely repetitive, pages.
The second available chapter (Chapter 11) is intended to be the first chapter in the section of the book entitled "Team Edition for Software Developers", and covers the Class Designer over its 27 pages. The chapter uses a tutorial format, but with clearly marked reference sections that will prove useful for quick looks in future. The Class Designer is not exactly the most complicated tool to use, but the chapter covers it well, and I picked up a few things I hadn't learnt through just dragging and dropping things and generally experimenting. I thought a section explaining "Microsoft, UML and Visio" made the points that needed to be made about UML very well, although I can see UML purists getting upset!
So all-in-all this new BetaBooks initiative looks to have got off to an interesting start. It's too early for me to recommend the service, but I'll certainly be following the progress with the Pro Team System 2005 book over the next few weeks.