i told my current boss to buy this book, because it looked to be the only SharePoint Search book on Amazon. It covers the basics, such as setting up content sources, crawling, adding scopes, etc... Honestly, I know a lot of that stuff from experimentation and working with SPS 2003. I didn't really care so much for anything, but Chapter 8. To be honest I am not a book reader. I am a book skimmer. I pretty much go into the index or the Table of Contents and get to the pieces that I need for the task at hand. So I opened up and skimmed through Chapter 8 and noticed the book had some code samples. I downloaded the code samples at MS Press and went to town. I started up a new user control on our test server and just pasted in anything to do with the FreeTextSearch. It has this really nice SQL-like query system, where you can basically do wildcard searching and all kinds of other nutty searches. I would definitely recommend buying the book just for this chapter, so you can dive a little deeper into the search object model and create your own search web parts and user controls. Here is the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Index-Search-Engines-PRO-Developer/dp/0735625352/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219357475&sr=8-1
As you know I don't usually pimp books that often, so seriously what are you waiting for buy the book? Oh yeah and if you really want to learn about writing content sources in code and some other nifty stuff he has that in there too...As usual I'll catch you guys later...Did anyone else realize I am over 100 entries?