InstallShield Beginner Information

[Amerisun]

I just purchased InstallShield, and am quite new to the whole thing. Our company needs to automate an install which consists of a handful of 3rd part installs (EXE's, registry tweaks, Java install, Excel Add-In's, etc.).

I am curious if there is a site out there, some youtube videos, or some kind of tutorial for beginers to understand the process and the product as a whole. Reading their documents, and tutorials that come with the product almost make it seem like you should know where all these screens are, and what the structure of a project is, and how it all fits together. There is some very beginner information missing to kind of show the tool off and how it functions / interacts.

I am a seasoned developer but never worked with InstallShield before and only used either my own installers or used the Setup projects or tools included with the tool(s) I was using at the time (Eclipse, Visual Studio, Interdev, etc.) so technically speaking I am ripe to learn, just need a good solid foundation of what Installshields all about.

Thanks ahead of time for any information for a noobie InstallShield developer.

[SteveLovell]

I watched all these to start me off:
http://www.wavepointstudios.net/Free-InstallShield-Tutorials.aspx

[SteveLovell]

Does anyone know of any other sites or information sources? I am trying to learn how to use installshield with SQL server and I am just not understanding it at the moment.

Some other sites I use are blogs etc that I calll through my RSS feeder (in no particular order)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/InstallTalk
http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=installshield&sort=newest
http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/feed
http://feeds.msigeek.com/msigeek
http://msmvps.com/blogs/installsite/atom.aspx
http://feeds.feedburner.com/InstallationDeveloperBlog
http://support.flexerasoftware.com/rss/acresso_is.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DeploymentEngineering
http://buildmaestro.wordpress.com/feed/

[Amerisun]

Steve,

Thanks for your response! I had already watched a lot of those video's. Although they are good information pieces, they are not good for the really novice InstallShield user.

Unless you have the lego blocks correctly in your head as to what all those icons are in InstallShield and how to even start from someone that has never seen the interface before... it's easy with such a complex piece of software to start off doing "the wrong thing".

I will probably try to get my manager to purchase the training from WavePoint studios, but it's pretty wild that there are no other free resources for at least the beginer out there for InstallShield. The documentation with that is the "tutorial" in the software, just uses the wizard and is very simplistic, so it's not easy to get a good foundation for building more complexe install's the correct way.

I want to be sure that my install, for example, can completely uninstall and clean itself not leaving behind registry settings or files on the system. Things like this are not easily documented, and you need a good foundation of the way things are done to do this. Which at this point even after a few weeks poking around the interface and reading as much as I can, I still feel like I know less than I should to start building a solid installer.