If you want to learn WiX, but are not sure whether you need to spend money on this book instead of relying solely on free resources available online, do yourself a favor: buy the book. It will explain the basic concepts of both the Windows Installer technology and WiX development better than other tutorials, wikis, and help guides you may find (at least based on the resources I found user setup packages).

A couple of things I found somewhat confusing include description of properties, variables, etc, when it's not clear whether these get resolved during build time or deployment time and issues pertaining to 64-bit vs 32-bit installers (e.g. how system folders get resolved on various combinations of platforms and installers: 32-bit MSI/64-bit OS, etc). I wish the index were more comprehensive; most of the time when I needed to find something, I just flipped the pages.

I agree with points made by other three reviewers, so I won't repeat them. In short, if you're planning to use WiX to write installers, get this book; you will find it quite helpful.

I got a copy of this book to review and found it to be a good read over a few weekends. Overall, I was very happy with how it broke down all the concepts and explained in easy to understand examples how everything fits together. It would have been a very handy resource for me had it been around 6 years ago when I started using WiX. Over the past few years I've been very focused on the patching infrastructure of WiX and was very interested in seeing how this book would present patches and updates. Overall I was happy with the way it was presented. It helps the developer understand the difference between the main update types and helps them make a decision on which to use. For anyone trying to do any more advanced patching or updating the explanations in the book dont go deep enough. They skip over the details of some important advanced features such as seqencing/supercedence, how patch families behave at runtime, how to patch multiple products with a single patch, and delta patching. Patching itself is probably worth its own small book so I dont fault the author for skipping over these things because you can get lost in them. I think that leaves the door open for a sequel called "Advanced WiX" :). Overall, this is a good book that anyone solving problems using WiX and Windows Installer could benefit from.