5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Outlook 2000 Programming in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself...in 24 Hours).

1. When I purchased this book, I was expecting to really learn how to program Outlook. What I got was a choppy book that doesn't cover the subject in much depth whatsoever.

   This book suffers on a number of fronts. I think much of the blame lies on the publisher with only some of it on the author. The fact is, Sams has created a whole "Teach yourself X in 24 hours" series. Each book in the series uses 24 small chapters that you can read very quickly. This format is a downfall because it artificially forces an author into a fixed format. You must have 24 chapters, one per "hour." Each chapter must be very short to avoid exceeding an hour's reading time. Many of the chapters in this book were less than 20 pages each. With tables and screen shots, that doesn't leave much room for prose. Indeed, with these restrictions, an author cannot spend a lot of time on complex subjects or create chapters at appropriate locations dictated by the material.

   As a result of the format, Mosher has produced a book that only introduces the subject of Outlook forms, Outlook VBScript programming, and Outlook VBA programming without much depth. Many of the chapters are simply a rehash of VBScript and VBA reference material without much expository description. While this material is appropriate for inclusion, it burns about seven chapters out of 24. As a result, there isn't much room left over for other things.

   Another problem is that the book is choppy. It jumps back and forth between VBScript and VBA almost at random within chapters making it very difficult to read. If you are only interested in Outlook forms, for instance, you have to wade through a large amount of VBA material searching for the VBScript material. You can't just skip a few VBA-only chapters.

   While descriptions of both VBScript and VBA are appropriate for the book, the constant context switches also make it very difficult to use the book in any reference manner. After looking up something in the book, one can't determine whether the material applies to VBScript or VBA without rereading whole sections of the chapter to pick up the context.

   Finally, the largest fault that I see with this book is a lack of deep examples. Most of the examples are very, very small and disconnected from each other. I would have liked to see more material on VBScript and forms since that is the easiest way to create applications within Outlook itself.

   In the end, I get the feeling that Mosher understands the material but didn't have enough paper to say anything useful. Forced with a difficult choice of burning pages on VBScript and VBA tutorials or producing in-depth examples, she chose the tutorial material and produced an acceptable introductory book that leaves that vetran programmer wanting more.




2. Although this title is introductory in nature, it alerts you to how powerful Outlook really is. The book does a good job of teching the newbie developer/programmer the basics of the trade as far as Outlook is concerned, while showing the experienced developer who has no Outlook experience what Outlook is capable of. It also makes an excellent introduction to software development in general b/c you end up with bonafide programs that are easy to modify and that you can actually use right away. Looking forward to more Outlook books by Mrs. Mosher.



3. Consise, to the point, well laid out hour long lessons on unleashing the power of Outlook forms. Recommended for both the novice (like myself) and even experts will pick up useful tips.



4. I need to buy Sams Teach Yourself Outlook 2000 Programming in 24 Hours Book, Where can I have it as soon as possible? Please let me know



5. Sue Mosher is a very readable writer and there's no doubt she knows her stuff inside and out. Most books in the Teach Yourself in 24 Hours series are beginner-intermediate introductions to the subject. That's true with Mosher's book - however, she manages to cover an impressive breadth of material in 24 small lessons.

   The problem is finding the material. This book could use a revamp in structure (I hope the publishers of the new 2002 edition are listening). There IS a good table of contents and a satisfactory index, but it's still devilishly hard to find stuff in this book, and to see how it fits together. The VBA/VBScript distinction is probably the biggest problem. The beginning Outlook programmer, even a programmer with experience in other languages, will not easily discern why Mosher talks about VBScript on one page and VBA on another. VBScript and VBA are distinct tools, with very different applications in Outlook programming. Mosher makes that point, but not clearly enough, and the struture of the book obscures the point. In the real world, "Outlook Form Design" could refer to VBScript or VBA programming. In Mosher's book, it refers only to the former - which is confusing and misleading. Instead of "Outlook Form Design", the first section should be titled "Customizing Default Outlook Forms with VBScript". The second section could be called "Designing New Outlook Forms with VBA" (although "Design with VBA", the current title, isn't bad).

   There are lots of practical examples in the book. As said above, the breadth of this book is amazing (even if depth suffers a little as a result), and there are pertinent examples for just about every topic covered. In order to facilitate a more unified structure, it might be helpful to give examples that are related to each other and form a single, functional "Outlook Application". That may help the reader understand how seemingly unrelated material fits together, and would certainly better point up the distinction between VBScript and VBA.

   This Teach Yourself Book (like others in the series) has a few typos - nothing too serious...

   Great book - just needs some reorganizing.

5 comments about Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic.

1. I am an experienced and well-readobject-oriented practitioner, and found the author's use of OO terms to be perfectly in line with other texts and with common industry usage. For example, I have read Bertrand Meyer's "Object-Oriented Software construction", "Design Patterns" by the Gang of Four, all of the C++ books by Scott Myers, Stroustrup, and Lippman, and many UML books. All of these books use the same terminology that Steven Roman does.

   That said, I think it should be pointed out that this is an _introductory_ text. This information is clearly pointed out on the back cover of the book, but did not make its way into any of the other reviews present on Amazon.com. Per the book's back cover "Readers are assumed to have only a modest familiarity with Visual Basic and some rudimentary programming skills".

   Given this starting point, then given the book's length of 181 pages, then subtract out the 24 pages dedicated to error handling (a separate subject from OO, by the author's own admission) and another 24 pages of code listings for the Turing machine example, you are left with about 130 pages of pretty basic instruction.

   If you are already experienced with OO and are looking for a detailed treatise on VB's support for OO, or workarounds for the support it lacks (inheritance support, overloading based on function signature, passing initialization data to object creation methods, etc.), or if you are interested in the subtle implications of its garbage collection scheme, or in the subtle difference in the VB meaning of "late binding" vs. most other languages, this is really not the book for you (I haven't found a book yet that covers this subject area.)

   Even though it did not meet my needs, I would still rate this book as an excellent introduction. I only encountered one error, on page 65, where Mr. Roman indicates that you cannot create a Container class that supports iteration using For Each... See "Hardcore Visual Basic" for a description of how this can be done (your collection class must implement the IEnumVARIANT interface).




2. I thought this book was an excellent opener for learning classes in VB. It was easy to follow and try.



3. I must admit I really liked this book. It is light even delightfull and refreshing. For a non business but more technical person the problem domain of the examples (students taking courses at a university) was a much awaited change.

   So why 3 and not 4 or 5 stars. The book has one error, inaccuracies and the examples have lots of style problems. Yes I know the author took the shortcuts in the examples deliberately, but it still produces bad examples. Naming of methods should not repeat the names of the classes. One can read programs a lot better when they are indented... Still I like this book much more than the truly 4 star Deborah Kurata book. It is a great first introduction. For the more serious reader I still recommend Applemans VB Components book, Pattisons VB COM book and for a more general introduction Cornell,Jezaks Core VB.




4. I needed to learn OO techniques within VB very quickly for my MSc Project. After experiencing a few mishaps with other verbose books (dealing with example case studies of company practises and other such un-necessary diatribe) this is the book I'd recommend. If you're familiar with OO techniques and simply require information on how to employ them within VB then so much the better - this is the best book for that. If however you're learning OO for the first time, Romans examples and explanation are good but better basic OO teaching sections can be found elsewhere. Overall then, a concise well written book for the VB OO beginner.



5. This book was hardly usefull to me.Firstly, most of the examples doesn't work out the way it is suppose to be.Secondly, Visual Basic 6 doesn't support some of the functions for example when you create a new class i was adding a new student to the CStudent class.(objStudent.Collection.Add objStudent)The Collection class has a single build-in (read-only) property called Count that returns the number of objectsin the class.The build-in methodsof the Collection class are Add, Remove and Item.P.55 from the first paragraph.I would like to know by the time the Autor was writing the book, what version of Visual Basic what he using???

5 comments about Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Language Reference (Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Reference Library).

1. I found this book to be helpful with my everyday programming. This book contains example code for every command in it. This bok also gives you the correct arguments for each command. I find this book to be one of my best developement tools in my arsenal. I recommend this book strongly to anyone looking to do serious VB programming.



2. Though you can get the exact same information online, I find that sometimes it's just better to have the hard copy in front of me. The book does a good job of not only showing the syntax, but what arguments to use and situations where the item applies. It's proven to be very, very useful and people would do well to pick this up if they prefer to use hard copy as I do.



3. How can you not love the VB5 Language Reference.

   I teach VB for a living, and I tell my students to re-read this Reference guide every 3 months---there's always something new that you'll see in it.

   Others will tell you that this information is provided with Books Online (and it is), but I prefer the printed version.




4. This reference book is a mirror image of the online help, but a lot more convenient. It contains pretty much all you need to know...and unlike the majority of tutorial books out there, the example code actually works.



5. This book is a compilation of various functions and commands available to the VisualBasic 5 environment. It provides examples and supplimental information to help users with different levels of expertise.

   Recommended if you want to really program in VB 5.0.

No comments about An Introduction to Programming Using Microsoft Visual Basic Versions 5 and 6.

2 comments about Microsoft Office Programming: A Guide for Experienced Developers.

1. Microsoft has done an excellent job of integrating its Office suite of products. So if you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can use it to programmatically perform tasks within each Office product, like Excel, Word or Powerpoint. Or, within one of these products, you can write an application that can invoke an instance of another program.
   
   Within one book, Stephens shows an efficient and unified way to learn how to do all this, and more. The trick is to be able to use VBA as a macro programming language. This is the key to understanding and using MS Office as a coherent entity. Ultimately, Stephens suggests that it is quicker than learning how to program each product on a case-by-case basis.
   
   Stephens cheerfully dumps on other texts that call you an idiot or dummy. (If you know what I mean.) He unabashedly expects you to be conversant in VB or VBA. To be specific, he doesn't waste time going over the elementary syntactical points of VBA. So you don't have to thumb through these pages in idle frustration. He drags you rapidly into non-trivial coding explanations of how to use VBA to get at MS Office.



2. This book is the book you need to get you going when you want to use two or more office applications in your own home brewed apps. This book doesn't drag you through learning the basics of VBA but,takes you straight to the meat and potatoes of office development. Shows you the differences in the object models and ways you can use those differences.
   
   It helped me restructure a few access applications to add value and greater functionality to them in my organization. I learned how I could use Excel as a report writer using preformated workbooks and the same with Word. If you want to know more about meshing office apps together without reading through material you already know then this is the book you need.

No comments about Digital Non-Linear Desktop Editing.

5 comments about Teach Yourself® Visual Basic® 6.

1. If you want to learn visual basic 6 then this book is what you need. It explains everything you need to know about programing and writing code. If I were you i would go buy this book right now.



2. This book did not give enough instructions to complete the projects. Every time I tried to do one of the projects, I had to go to an experienced VB programmer to see what was missing. The programmer confirms that it is not ME!! He says that there is no way the projects could work if you follow the instructions the way they are written in the book. There were always key parts left out.



3. This book is not for beginners. The computer terminology seems to advanced for beginners, but the beginner must decide that. The beginner should read pages 5-8 before buying this book as their introduction of VB.

   The screen shots are helpful, but sometimes they do not match the text descriptions step-by-step. However, I like this book for its breadth of coverage from: Deployment, Internet Applications, OLE, Images, Multimedia, the good old get/put file operations, and more than 1000 screen shots.

   As another reviewer has said, the coverage is not 100% complete, therefore I would not recommend it for beginners, but to get an overview and use for particular programming techniques in BASIC, I would still recommend the book. Also buy Harold Davis' VB6 Book for a better step-by-step approach.

   I have 4 VB6 books and the Hartman book I use as much as any. The MDI ( Multiple documents with the same parent form ) coverage was confusing to me and wasted pages on an example to show that MDI forms can't directly hold buttons and other data input controls.




4. This is a great book for the intermediate to the advanced beginner. There are a lot of programs included and the
   diagrams super helpful. The wide range of topics covered and the numerous links to great sites alone, made this a buy for me. I would suggest, for the absolute beginner (no previous programming
   skills) to start off with an easier "VB for Dummies" type book, and then go for Patricia Hartman's.



5. I have read dozens of books on programming languages and tools and this is the worst that I have ever used. The book is very hard to follow, the examples are incomplete and require significant additional research to completed. I would not recommend this book to a beginner, they will become very frustrated.

5 comments about Beginning Visual Basic 5.

1. This is one of the best Beginner's Teach Yourself type books on a programming language that I've ever read. It's pitched at just the right level for an absolute beginner but at the same time the author manages not to be patronizing. I like the chatty style, and the way only one new concept at a time is introduced so that I wasn't overwhelmed by too much new information at once. I found I could just about read straight through the book without having to flip back and forth looking up things I'd forgotten or didn't understand.

   Although this is not supposed to be a complete reference to the language, it could do with a fuller index. It's a great way to get to grips with the basics (pardon the pun) of the language. I'd recommend it as a means of understanding this sort of event-driven language, particularly for programmers who are familiar with only 'non-visual' languages such as Pascal, C, etc. You'll also need a more comprehensive guide and/or reference manual to become fully conversant in the language.




2. Many errors were not on the publisher's site. If you are going to write a book, please make sure the code works. Try using it! Am I being unreasonable?



3. I'm in a class which uses this book as it's primary text. We have problems in some of the code exercises. Some of the code in the book just doesn't work and it gets really aggrivating dealing with it. Additionally, features and functions are incorporated without first explaining them to the reader. Overall this is not a very good book to learn from. I personally had to purchase additional materials to better learn the material.



4. This is a great book for beginners. I found Peter Wright's easy going style of writing to be refreshing. This book covers a bit more ground than most "beginner books" therefore you will gain a solid understanding of the language.



5. This is the perfect book for self-study and for anyone interested in learning vb with little or no programming experience. The author introduces us to the fundamental concepts of vb and hand guide us to implementing useful vb applications without overwhelming readers with too much information at one time. each concept, each section is written with extreme clarity and gently eases readers to the world of vb. by the end of the book, readers are ready to creating powerful vb applications with a solid understanding of the vb language.Beginning Visual Basic 5 is without a doubt, *the* best introductory book to learning vb. you might want to get Core Visual Basic 5 as your second book for more advanced coverage. good luck!

No comments about Basic Apple Basic.

5 comments about Introduction to Programming Using Visual Basic 5.0, An.

1. I have 4 books , Visual Basic in 24 hours Visual Basic in 21 days,Beginning Visual Basic, Visual Basic night school, non of them teach you at all about programming fundamentals. Thanks to the author David I. Schneider . his book have first 4 chapters about programming fundamentals.And i find its very good for students at any level.



2. I have used this book to teach a Visual Basic class. This book seems to remember that programming with Visual Basic involves more than the graphics. It gives a number of exercises at the end of each chapter which is very useful for an instructor.



3. Contains many good examples while covering moderately complex concepts. Great for the beginner who wants to learn VB easily on their own. I used the book throughout college and now it makes a great reference in the job place.



4. This book is an excellent book for starters, who do not know anything about programming. I learnt a lot from this book. David is an excellent author. The book is very well written in simple english and has plenty and plenty of examples to learn from. I always look for books written by David I. Schneider, unfortunatley he wrote only two or three books so far.



5. This is a great book. It has everything you need to know about VB 5. Currently, I am using it as a reference for the MCP when I get to a term I do not remember or know.