Reccommended books?

[Fluff]

For

Windows 2003 Server .

Windows XP support / Office 2003

Running a MSDE database

Basically that are easy to read. For a novice / intermediate.

Sybex?

[Mcollector]

Probably the Micro$oft Press books. I found mistakes in 3rd party books, particularly the CompTIA-oriented books (A+, etc.), including Sybex. I'm not impressed with what I've seen of Sybex or CompTIA. Micro$oft Press books seem a bit more professional.

There's the Micro$oft Resource Kit books for each OS (and maybe for Office, too, I'm not sure), which I don't like that much (too much management style crap about "deployment," etc.), but they are fair, at least for the workstation OSes. The Resource Kit for W2000 Server is terrible. All of the books in the W2000 Server Resource Kit are worthless except for one or two. If this is an indication of what the W2003 Server Resource Kit is like, I'd avoid it.

Micro$oft Press also does MSCE and other certification/training manuals, and the "Companion" books, both of which I think are better than the Resource Kits and stuff by Sybex or CompTIA. The "Companion" (aka Expert Companion) series are written at a more "accessable" level. The Micro$oft Press training/certification manuals actually make pretty good reference books, and gave quite clear, succinct, no BS, no extraneous fluff explanations, at least they did for NT4. The W2K ones don't seem as nice, but these 2 series are the only ones I've seen that I would recommend.

For other things, consider the "Nutshell" series from O'Reilly.