3 comments about VB.NET & SQL Server 2000: Building an Effective Data Layer.

1. I own about 20 Wrox programming books. This is one of the more disappointing ones in my collection.

   I bought the book because I was specifically interested in "Building an Effective Data Layer" with VB.Net, i.e. implementing n-tier applications and specifically the Data Access tier. Unfortunately this important topic rarely came up in the book and when it did it was lost in the details. It does cover the SQLClient, and DataReader, ADO.Net, Data Binding and Stored Procedures. However, other books already do that.

   It never specifically covers the "Concept" of tiers, nor the strategy for implementing them (e.g. strategies for passing information between tiers, or using VB.Net's more object oriented features to implement the layers).

   The organization and emphasis was weak. The Second Chapter "The SQLClient Namespace" should have been an appendix. The very last chapter is a Case Study which involves a data layer, but the authors fail to explain the strategy and implementation of data tiers using VB .Net.

   All-in-all it was very, very disappointing.




2. Initially the book was a little overwhelming, but as our development team's competence and familiarity with .NET increased, so the later chapters became more valuable. This is especially true of the iBank Case Study, which provides a great "How To..." reference in building a complete enterprise
   application using all the elements of .NET based on multiple tiers (Presentation, Business, and Data Layers).

   The book's highly professional structure and coding techniques demonstrates the authors' deep knowledge and experience in the SQL/VB.NET domain.




3. A lost classic
   This is a great book -unfortunatly overlooked.
   A great partner to my other fave Wrox title-Proffesional VB Design patterns.

   My favorite chapters are Chapter 9 Component Services and Chapter 12 Case Study IBank
   You will have to work really hard on the case study 40hrs-80hrs + to get a real gain from this book but unlike some other Wrox books - its not over the top.

5 comments about Visual Basic .NET Power Tools.

1. This is a must have book for Visual Basic programmers. It has a lot of practical tools to give your programs the edge.



2. I have purchased several vb.net books over the past couple of years, somewhere around 6-7 books. None were as informative and precise as this book. The authors provide many details that all the other books do not cover. They give many inside details that otherwise many programmers like myself would probably never know. Chapter 1 alone gives a lot of insight into the .net framework that all of my other books did not provide. Without going into every aspect of this book that makes it stand out above the rest, I'll just say this...I've completed more of my project with this book than all of the other books combined. Also, check out books by the Murach publishers; they come in at a somewhat distant second, but these books have been of great help also.



3. First of all, we all know that .NET harnesses way more power that VB6. However, we also know what a pain it was when we had to make that leap to adjust our thinking to the new platform, and quite frankly it was a hard one for most of us. Things that seemed rather easy before were made unnessarily difficult. (Or so it seemed to us VB6 programmers).
   
   Well this book starts right off the bat explaining the "Why's" of that and is not shy to be honest. I appreciate that, especially after reading about 7 books on my book-shelf which highly extols .NET
   
   Make no mistake about it, dotnet IS better, but the honesty these authors exhibit while explaining features (that no other dotnet book has that I have seen) is most refreshing.
   
   Great book, but is somewhat advanced. The first chapter is worth its weight in gold. If you know VB6 very well and know VB.NET somewhat, this book will help you.
   
   This will help the adjustment and transition to .NET more smoorther for advanced VB6 programmers.



4. It is very sad that this book is as bad as it is. I would recommend almost any other book for .NET if you actually want to know what you are doing. There are a FEW good examples, but it ends there.
   
   This person actually says english and art people are better programmers than math and science people because most ALL apps today use little or no math. What an idiot. If anyone has written code for ANYTHING you will find that you use math a lot!
   
   They also don't understand why and when you use the New keyword aka the difference between shared (static) and Instance Methods.
   There are many errors in this book, and the author(s) have a vague understanding at best of programming in general.
   
   I could go on and on, but hopefully this will give you enough knowledge to avoid this book and get a book you can learn something from.



5. Note: There is something odd about Amazon's processing of technical reviews. People goofing off, or what? I submitted this a couple of days ago and it never appeared - perhaps this will be the lucky time. The only other time this happened was also with a computer-related review. Anyway, here goes....
   
   I haven't read every page of this 560-page book, but I've seen enough to make me want to give a really strong recommendation. If you are working with VB.Net at all, you probably need this book.
   
   I say it's much better than its title, because to me, and I suspect to others, "Power Tools" suggests a bunch of handy add-ons - neat tricks, perhaps some useful utilities. That's not what this book is. It is a really thorough and well-written explanation of a host of absolutely key, fundamental topics in VB.Net.
   
   For instance, it's got the best, most concise description of public and private key security, and RSA encryption, with clear, straightfoward "how-to's," that I've ever seen. Also, the best and clearest description of middle-tier technology options, with comparisons betwen Web Services and .Net remoting, plus a good summary of COM+ and how to use existing COM+ components in .Net.
   
   Other chapters cover a wide range of topics - queuing, XML, regular expressions, ADO.Net, Reflection, deployment, and more...Whatever the topic that is currently interesting or challenging you, you'll probably find it here.
   
   In the Introduction, the reflections on Microsoft's clarity, or lack thereof, in documentation are often right to the point! And the whole issue of having a productivity language rewritten by exponents of a low-level, nitty-gritty approach is well covered. The two approaches to programming are very different, and in adding VB to the .Net family, much was gained but also quite a lot was lost that could have been kept - at the price, admittedly, of making VB able to do things that C# couldn't do! Don't tell me they couldn't have found a way to make things like user-defined types of arbitrary size, with fixed-length strings, and control arrays, translate into IL - they just didn't want to. The Power Tools authors don't use the term "language snobbery" but it comes inescapably to mind.
   
   The new VB9 tries to make a few gestures in the direction of ease of use, such as inferred type definition, but they miss the point and in fact may just open the door to errors. Old VB6 hands aren't looking for the ability to write loose or sloppy code - they just want a more flexible tool, one where the compiler does more work to save the programmer's time, so we can get a working product out the door more quickly, That's always what VB was about, and Microsoft somewhat lost sight of that. Oh well...

1 comments about Fast Track Visual Basic .NET.

1. Fast Track Visual Basic.NET is an excellent follow-up book to the successful Public Beta version. I constantly use this book in the first instance, rather than the larger Professional Desktop books - because it provides me with concise & pragmatic explanations of the key technical issues in a manner that is intuitive.

   Back in early 2001, when Visual Studio.NET public beta was released I rushed out and bought a copy of VB.NET Programming With the Public Beta & C# Programming With the Public Beta. Recently I had the pleasure of working as a technical reviewer on both of the sequels: I am a time-poor developer and architect and rely on ensuring that I have access to quality information and value greatly a concise real-world professional explanation.

   Generally, as busy developers, we do not have the time to read a book from cover to cover but I found that the Fast Track book is actually well-suited for this because it is so well written and full of interesting issues; although it is also great to use simply as a reference book. But what really sells me on this book is its professional and friendly atmosphere; the craftsmanship of the authors; choice of content and clarity of explanation.

   A risk facing many VB.NET developers is that they will not comprehensively understand full Object Orientated programming nor the broader functionality of .NET; having been nurtured on legacy VB's. A C++ or Java developer moving to C# will have an enormous advantage over a legacy VB developer; however this book provides an excellent chapter that simply and clearly articulates the new object-orientated capabilities of our language in a manner that quickly offers the opportunity to bridge the gap.

   Apart from the expected syntax and ADO.NET chapters there is excellent discussion of creating a Windows Service, Installation & Deployment and the big issue of Interoperability and Migration (invoking COM and calling Windows API's and using the migration wizard).

   The book is full of explanations that simplify complex issues, that are well supported by short, realistic & pragmatic examples and offers a comprehensive understanding of our new & very powerful development paradigm.

5 comments about Learn VB .NET Through Game Programming.

1. Andrew said this book was good so i am gonne get it too!! I hope it DOESN'T taste like chicken either...



2. The reason I'm giving this book a low score is because I don't think it does what it promises. First of all, it's very hard to learn ANY programming language(including Basic) through game programming. If you know VB.NET well, go ahead and give it a try. I, however, am a newbie to game programming, and after reading through the first few chapters and finding the text confusing and having to frequently read lines over and over because it doesn't explain itself in a fasion it should to it's target audience, still don't know how to program a game.



3. If you want to learn some game programming, its pretty good. If you want to learn .NET its not so good. I use and enjoy VB.NET and thought this would be a good way to learn game programming. It does a pretty good job of introducing that. It would be better if it had some exercises for you to try on your own, rather than just copying the book programs, thats the only way to learn something is to do it yourself. On the positive side, if you are an experienced programmer, this book does a good job of teaching VB.NET and introducing games.

   If you want to learn VB.NET from scratch this book is not for you. It doesn't teach you how to get started with Visual Studio, let alone VB. If you don't already know some programming, you won't be able to follow it. Also, it has many typos and errors that break the code examples. If you are an experienced programmer, they are easy to spot. If not, you can use the downloaded code to fix them, but save yourself the aggravation, get a book that is really geared toward beginners.




4. I've studied from tons of books over the years and this is my least favourite ever. The subject matter is presented in what I feel is mostly a haphazard way. The author uses games to illustrate concepts about vb.net. However, if you wanted to search the book for a particular subject for reference, it would be hard to do. It does sort of build on topics, but not like a book should. The worst problem is that the first program, a cheesy dice rolling program is packed with coding errors. The errors weren't bad, but they were numerous. I did find the coding example interesting, but it did seem more like random mixture of stuff than an organized explanation. I guess my biggest complaint is that I shouldn't have to debug the code examples in the book this much. Overall, I am unhappy with the book and I'll not buy another APress book again. It seems to me that this book suffered from bad editing and rushed production.



5. I bought this book on a few reviews and the price of the book. What it offers is sadly not able to run. I mean, I downloaded the source from the publishers' site, and that ran fine. However, I compared it to my hand-typed version (following the books' examples) and my program is a mirror image (it seems to me, anyway) of the authors' code. However, it continues to give me an error on something that already has a value, and it reports it as having a 'null' value.
   
   And this is just the first program in the first chapter of the book. I
   
   'm sorry, but if you are going to put code in a book, please make it ALL consistent with every other part, there were a few places where the compiler warned me about some names not being defined because the author got lazy and put an abbriviated name in for another variable or procedure.
   
   I will continue to read this book and try to code it, but I will be wary of other programming books that come from this publisher.

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.