No comments about Visual Basic in Easy Steps (In Easy Steps).

3 comments about Microcontroller Projects Using the Basic Stamp 2nd Edition.

1. The author has a good approach in revealing some of the pitfalls with using the Basic Stamp.Advanced users will certainly find some of Al's solutions very heplful, as he explains in detail floating point expressions, and working with negative numbers.
   Inside the book is good code on interfacing with a serial LCD, as with others I read, Al has taken some of the mystery out of it, and really puts them to practice in his projects.If your novice to electronics, then this book is for you. Al explains how to interface keypads, switches, LEDS with no experience at all, and certainly makes it look easy.I was impressed by how he expained the circuit diagrams, and other key points on interfacing.
   Al has also included his own programmer in the book, and I haven't even started to list his ideas for your next project.
   I'm only giving it a four, because the CD was unreadable, and the publisher was kind of enough to send me another one.



2. This book is for the beginner that wants to get into electronics and has heard that the Stamp is a pretty cool thing. The book starts out with an introduction to the Stamp and Electronics in general. From this, the user is given more detail on the Basic Stamp. The majority of the book is dedicated to the projects presented in the book and this is where I learned the most about the Stamp. The projects focus on interfacing to other devices and this is where the book really shines.



3. this book is for the stamps 1 & 2 biginer this book waist 152 pages
   just to revie the stamp comanads that you cane find with stamp programing
   manual
   at the parallaxinc.com and from page 153 to 214 a simpel electronic
   circuits a led relay sound ic 386 pwm out put and ltc1298 all cane
   be found in stamp programing manual too from 215 to 248 thier is
   a simpel ic 555 an explain of his pake1 that is a pic16f84 that do
   a slave work for the stamp the pc vb frequency counter
   that is conected to stamp that make the frequency count and display
   it at pc i liked this project but the program did not work no mater
   what i try at page 256 thier is the extending pc I/O by using the
   stamp as a slave .it it is a very nice project but the vb program
   is not complet may be it is a an importent pro to be given on
   a 44.95$ book then from page 269 till 340 thier is the lcd keypads
   darlington transistor stepper motor leds all are explained in stamp
   programing manual too at page 341 to the end thier is chapter 10
   that explains how to start with pic in a very brief .
   in the end if you get the stamp programing manual
   you will be missing nothing

5 comments about ADO : ActiveX Data Objects.

1. I bought this book for one chapter - data shaping, and it turned out to be the only place that I found that was able to explain it in a way that I could understand. The author has a knack for thoroughly explaining the material. I also found the appendix on SQL helpful.



2. You can't get a more complete ADO book.. ever gritty detail is in this book.. It's almost too much information. :- ) if you code ADO. This is a good book to have.

   Cheers

   Wayne lambright




3. This is a well written book for existing programmers who want to learn ADO. While the examples are in Visual Basic, the core concepts of ADO are very detailed and anyone with an understanding of a similar language, such as ASP or C++ should have no trouble applying the examples to the other language. It will not help you if you don't already know how to program.

   It also serves as a good reference book.




4. this is a very good book, comparing to MSDN ADO note on the web, which covers only access to .mdb database, this book covers a variety of methods and databases. Thank for the great contribution.



5. I have also read Programming ADO from David Sceppa and I prefer this one because it contains a lot examples with source code. My only complain is that there is only a small C++ program and the rest are all in Visual Basic. However, this is not a big issue as it is very easy to port the samples in C++.

5 comments about Learn to Program Visual Basic Databases (Learn to Program).

1. I don't usually write reviews of books but this book is exceptional. I consider myself a near expert with Microsoft Office VBA but struggled with Visual Basic (the application). The unusual classroom setting of this book made me feel as if I were in the classroom with John Smiley teaching. I was finally being taught by someone who knew how to teach. In chapter 4 I finally ran into a problem I couldn't figure out. John Smiley was gracious enough to post his email address in the front of the book so, at half past midnight I sent him a note discussing my problem. I recieved a response from John at 8:30 that morning. John knew exactly what my problem was and gave me instructions on how to fix it. Once applied, my project worked perfectly. I can't express enough how much I appreciate this kind of customer service. Thanks, John.



2. If ever you need a book to take you step by step into database programming, this is it. Professor Smiley takes his students slowly and very carefully into the subject of Database programming. This book is focused on depth rather than covers a whole bunch of topics and at the end you learn all of none. I particularly like the classroom setting. You really feel an environment of learning and- who knows? You may even make a few new friends. This book is so well explainde, that you do not need to read over and over to make sense of what he is explaining. I must complement him for writing a really great book. If you have not yet already gotten copies of his other titles. I think you should do so, He makes learning fun.



3. John Smiley's book is supposed to be an introductory level book for novice level programmers. At the time it was written, I'm sure it was. However, the book is written around Access 97 and a lot has changed since then. The code simply will not work without patches, work arounds and lots of digging. It takes far more than a novice programmer to figure this one out. It defeats the purpose. If you don't like frustration, find a more recent book..



4. Unlike any other books, this book is presented in a manner where readers would feel as though the he / she is sitting in a class lecture room and listening to Professor Smiley's lecture.
   
   The reader / prospective reader i.e. YOU will be in class with Valerie, Peter, Kate, Rhonda, Kevin, Tom, Melissa, Rachel, Steve, Kathy, Dave, Ward, Blaine, Linda, Mary, Chuck, Lou and Bob. (If your name is not in the roll, perhaps Professor Smiley missed you out! :) )
   
   Readers will be presented with the China Shop Project Database Project. Professor Smiley starts off with simple problems and ascends to more not-so-simple problems.
   
   While reading the exercises, sufficient Windows diagrams are presented and it is as if you were doing a hands-on on Visual Basic Database.
   
   I personally feel that readers should have some knowledge on Visual Basic before attempting this book.



5. I took an online class with John Smiley several years ago using the Beginning Programming with VB 6.0. I then took a live course using VB.net with XML along with others who have been programming for some time, and could almost keep up with them. It would have been better if I'd gotten through all the Smiley books first.
   
   I tried doing this book on my own a couple of years ago, but got bogged down. However I sent him an email with my problems, which he replied to immediately, remembering me from the class. He suggested a work around, so when I took up the book this time I could work through all the exercises. This was a great review of VB and databases, and now I am really understanding connectivity, which I hope to use with websites some day.
   
   Don't use this book as a starter. It continues where the Introductory book leaves off. I noticed that someone complained that it wasn't introductory enough. They just didn't start the right place.
   
   Next step will be to try his Java book.
   
   I would hope that John Smiley would revise these books for .net and newer versions of Access, as they are very worthwhile beginner books!

5 comments about Microsoft Visual Basic 6: Complete Concepts and Techniques (Shelly Cashman Series).

1. This book was extremely useful to me in and out of my Visual Basic class. I used it for an intro to programming class in which I found it very easy to use. The book went step by step with pictures that basically spelled out exactly how I needed to do each task. The best thing about this book is that it brings you from the basic levels of VB to the more advanced topics. Now, as I go into my more advanced programming courses, I use this book as a reference. It is ideal if you want to learn VB on your own, and as a text book I give an A+. I recommend this to the beginner to intermediate programmer.



2. I am using this book along with a university course in VB6. I find the book helpful and clear, although maybe TOO clear. I mean, once you learn really basic simple stuff like how to draw buttons and place items on a form, I think that they should then drop the painful step-by-step instructions on how to do those things once you get to later chapters and move on to the CODE (the new stuff). Other than that I find the book very helpful.



3. The purchase of this book was a horid mistake. Only people who either want to learn a VERY little bit of VB or have cash to burn (in which case you should e-mail me for some ideas) should buy this book. There are other books which have a much lager, more usefull, scope. The book does hold your hand throughout the proccess, but it never lets go. The pace is way to slow, even for the newest newbie. The authors must have had elementary school children in mind while editing. It's more of a kids picture book than a textbook. Trust me... don't waste your money!!



4. I teach Advanced Visual Basic. I inherited students who took the prerequisite course, Visual Basic from instructors who used this book. All the students I got in Advanced Visual Basic had absolutely no idea about programming. All they could do was draw good looking forms with some controls on them and copy the code from Shelly and Cashman book. It does not provide challenging, unsolved programming projects for the students. All the students learn is to copy its forms and its code. Whatever this book is, it cannot serve as a good textbook!

   For my Advanced Visual Basic, I use Chapters 7 through 12 and appendices of "Computer Programming with Visual Basic 6: A Problem-Solving Approach with Cdrom" by Alka R. Harriger,Susan K. Lisack,John K. Gotwals / Paperback / Prentice Hall, and I like it very much. Frankly, Chapters 1-6 of the Harriger et al book would be much better for the first course!




5. First there'e the misleading title - COMPLETE CONCEPTS & TECHNIQUES
   Once I went through this book, I found it very easy & thought I was really a PRO in VB6.
   I got a rude shock when I actually met my programming friends: If you think you are a pro and can create useful applications with this book, you cannot be more WRONG. This book teaches you nothing about VB6 language. All it does is teaching you to layout a nice form & some extremely elementary code.
   I personally do not think you can create anything useful based on the knowledge from this book.

2 comments about Introduction To Programming with Visual Basic .net.

1. This book is an introductory programming text. To be clear, it is not an introduction to Visual Basic.NET for existing programmers; it is entirely aimed at new and learning programmers with no prior experience. It serves such an audience admirably.
   
   The book opens with an historical overview of programming languages and the nature of problem solving. It then progresses in a methodical and sensible manner through working in the IDE, designing forms using visual components, responding to events, working with primitive data types, handling basic user interaction, conditional statements and branching, looping, procedures and functions, scope, arrays and algorithms, database integration, SQL, file handling, ASP.NET, and classes. This gives the book an excellent depth, with material not usually included in introductory texts but which are highly relevant to the construction of functional software.
   
   An especially nice aspect of this book is the development of a "real-world" financial application at the conclusion of each chapter, giving immediate practical exposure to the theoretical concepts being discussed.
   
   Scattered throughout the book are highlighted snippets entitled "tips from the pros". These attempt to convey wisdom from experienced programmers. Their value is somewhat dubious, as for the most part these do not - as may have been reasonably expected - explain best practices or highlight "gotchas" for new programmers. They do pitch sensible ideas, but which are largely common-sense and hardly revelationary.
   
   Additionally, two other matters are irksome. Firstly, the authors leave abstract data types right to the very end chapter, yet this should perhaps be raised earlier, after primitive data types. Secondly, leading on from the first, the authors title this chapter classes, yet beyond constructing one's own data types there is no real coverage of object-oriented design.
   
   That aside, this is an outstanding and very easily digested work. It is well recommended for beginning coders, giving sound instruction in both the art and science of programming and a solid grounding in a popular and contemporary language.



2. Had to get the book for a programming class and actually enjoyed reading it. Easy to understand, well written, need more textbooks like this for college students.
   
   Had a poor index and no class library in the back :(

5 comments about Visual Basic for Testers.

1. This book is long overdue for too long QA resources have been limited by others and themsleves to not look under the bonnet, so to speak or have payed for inflexible third party tools to do a simple job. I have developed entire smart'newbie' QA technical teams that just couldn't believe how easy it was to use code to test an application. It also adds to there skill set, gets them to really think 'how' best to test the application from a code point of view and even improves their test cases.

   Mary Sweeney's book "Visual Basic for Testers" is the starting point for any Manager who wants to do the same and give his/her team that extra weapon for finding issues.




2. This book is really a primer on Visual Basic for someone who has never programmed before. Testing is just an afterthought.
   If you're a developer trying to improve processes through testing this book is not for you.

   If you're a software tester who knows absolutely nothing about programming, nice to meet you, I didn't know you existed, take a look at this book.




3. I've had several college-level courses now in Testing and this is the only book we used that actually had anything to do with testing and programming. This is an absolute essential text for a college curriculum in testing. I checked out several curricula and found that most of them use it. I wonder about those that don't. In our course we also explored the use of .Net for testing and in my opinion it's a lot easier, more clear and way less expensive to use the techniques in this book. If you're trying to learn it on your own, this is still a good book. It's got exercises and examples.

   My wife's been a tester for many years but didn't do programming and she loved it. She said it gave her a lot of ideas. Maybe if you've already been an automated tester and/or developer for many years, this book isn't going to help, since it has a lot of basics. But if you are trying to learn, where else would you go? I liked the way you could just sit down and read it from cover to cover. It's unpretentious and doesn't talk down to us. It does expect you already know testing terminology and basics, but before you read this, you should.




4. This book is exactly what the title says: an introduction to Visual Basic for testers. It succeeds wonderfully at that.
   It is not a book about testing. If you already know VB and want to know how to test your application, there are a few chapters near the end that you will find useful but this book is not really intended for you.



5. This book neither teaches Software Testing nor programming. And is intented for VB related Programmers/testers who know some VB and Testing. There was a possibility of being little more specific, I mean the early chapters of the book talk about VB projects, creating them and the very basic information about IDE rather than testing. There could have been a possibility of taking up a real project implementation, lets say testing/automating the entire MS Office testing using VB.
   But again, this has been a very serious effort for automation and deserves a lot of appreciation.
   
   Abhinav Vaid

1 comments about FORTRAN 90 for Engineers and Scientists.

1. This book is a fairly easy and simple introduction to Fortran 90. It is well directed towards the beginner and the beginner will most definitely profit from buying this book. The example codes are well chosen and the exercises provide ample practice in learning the basics of the language. The book covers much of the Fortran 90 syntax and the language reference in the appendix is handy. Presentation wise it is well constructed with a bi-colour approach which is good and makes the concepts easy to grasp, especially for a textbook, as compared to a one colour layout like a book with black print all over.

5 comments about .NET Gotchas.

1. I got this book as a gift. I'm not sure that I would have bought it myself. Pros: good technical information, one of the few books to give both VB.NET and C# versions. Cons: very dry writing style and the topics seemed disconnected somehow. So, I give it a 5 for technical and a 1 for writing, for an overall of 3.0. I think this is a book you'll like a lot or dislike a lot.



2. Are you among the many programmers who have come to appreciate how powerful Microsoft's .NET Framework can be as a platform for development? If you have, this book is for you! Author Venkat Subramaniam, has done an outstanding job of writing a great book that shares his .NET experiences with developers, to help them avoid the gotchas!
   
   Subramaniam begins by discussing the features in the CLR and the Framework that can impact the behavior and performance of your application. Next, the author focuses on Visual Studio- and compiler-related gotchas. Then, he delves into gotchas at the language and API level of the .NET platform. The author continues by discussing the issues of language operability gotchas. In addition, the author next focuses on concerns related to garbage collection, and how to write code that handles it effectively. He also discusses, the things you need to be aware of in the areas of inheritance and polymorphism so you can make the best use of these important concepts. Next, the author addresses the general problems with threading, the thread pool, asynchronous calls using delegates, and threading problems related to Windows Forms and Web Services. Finally, he focuses on details you should be aware of to make interoperability work for you.
   
   With the preceding in mind, the author has done an excellent job of writing a book that focuses on the .NET Framework and language features that have consistently exhibited behavior that is not obvious to the programmer. So, why should you be interested in learning about these unexpected features? Because, knowning these little gotchas will help you avoid mistakes!



3. ... for many reasons, foremost in my mind - the format makes for very efficient reading - and if all you have is 30 minutes a day, a gotcha or two a day and in a month you are done. That being said, I found some of the topics rather esoteric, so chose to revisit those at some point in the unknown, er, future.
   
   Superb succinct read.



4. I made the mistake of buying this book based on recommendations I had read here on amazon.com -- don't make the same mistake. If you are looking for practical techniques that will help you write .NET applications, this is NOT the book you want. Now this book is sort of interesting and points out weirdnesses of .NET but nothing that I hadn't seen online. So, check this book out first by browsing through a hard copy in a bookstore to see if it's what you want. I wish I had.



5. This book is written with determination and care. Every aspect is explained at length and the examples are abundant.
   
   But this book is not for everyone. If you want to learn .NET, C# or VB.NET programming from it, you won't be able to do it. Also, if you have time to search through zillions of MSDN pages in order to seek various details on .NET and/or .NET languages, then this book is not for you either.
   
   But if your time is tight and you want to have many .NET common mistakes at your fingertips with no effort from your part, then this book is for you.

2 comments about Mobile Application Development with SMS and the SIM Toolkit.

1. Because 3G is on the verge of being rolled out in the US by major carriers I purchased this book to explore how to best integrate the next generation cell phone with system management information for our data center. Although this book will work with GSM phones as well, our company is standardized on a carrier that will be making 3G available, so if you're using GSM my comments will also apply.

   This book will get you started in mobile development quickly if you're using or going to use the SmartTrust toolset, which I highly recommend. This book is about those tools, so if you are not going to use them don't get this book.

   The authors do not mess around. They introduce the basics, then very quickly jump into design, development and testing. If you're a developer you'll appreciate the lack of fluff and the fast pace. The book lives up to its title in all respects and is outstanding for anyone who needs realistic information about developing mobile applications using proven tools and techniques.




2. Very good introduction to SMS (Short Messaging Service) and its interaction with SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) in mobile devices, as of c. 2001. If you know nothing of the field (as I didn't), you can get up to date in a good day's reading. In that regard it was exactly what I was looking for.
   
   Sure, lots of the technology has moved forward since this edition was published, but since the authors give plenty of well-organized references to the enormous body of standards covering mobile networks (not just GSM but 3G), SMS, SIM, etc. it should be easy to follow from where they left off to what's current using online resources. So I would not say this book is outdated, by any means.
   
   While it's great that actual code examples are provided, the code is all MS Windows-based. Even the examples using web interfaces use VBScript. So if you're not savvy on MS/Windows programming (from what I read on Linux forums, there are actually some people out there like that!), you might not find the examples too useful.
   
   A gripe about the book is the sloppy copy editing/proofreading. There are lots of typos and glitches - far more than a reputable publisher like McGraw-Hill should have let through.
   
   For example, there's a chart (p. 123) showing the hex file names on a UICC smart card. Some of them have don't care bits in the file names, and are correctly shown as "4FXX" but one is shown as "4FSS." If you were new to this type of notation, this kind of error might cause some confusion.
   
   And here's a real brain-twister, taken verbatim from p. 129: "No matter whose application it is, the subscriber can't figure out how to use it will call their network operator."
   
   Trying to decipher these oddities (I finally figured out the word "who" is missing between "subscriber" and "can't") can bog you down. If it were once or twice, it wouldn't be a big deal, but there are many of these throughout the text.
   
   So if you can breeze past those annoyances, this is a great survey book to bring you up to speed quickly.