5 comments about .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000 (Kaleidoscope).

1. The book is very much a hand's-on architect's/programmer's book. Not much emphasis on an academic viewpoint, but more the practical lessons from someone that has learnt from 10 or more years of design/programming. It contains many little insights that come from experience.
   
   It is (thankfully) not another beginner's book. It is set at the enterprise level.

   Good detail on testing and debugging. Throughout there is reference to scalability, fault tolerance and performance. I liked the way he introduced the test bed and using the same debugging approach across different layers.

   He is quite bold in suggesting the how things will go in the future (best architecture/design approach), offering various options, but admits some may be wrong.

   I would like to have seen more test results, I know these will be available with the non-beta code, but to compare methods, it is useful to see comparative details in the book.

   It is a good overview of the possible current architectural solutions. He realises there are many solutions to a problem, like life, the answer is a matter of balance and compromise.

   Good size book. Easy to read, so it must have been well written!




2. This is a good book. It is definitely more of a design book than a programming book (as the title says). A good developer has books like this in his or her library though.

   Unfortunately, Jimmy's writing is very hard to follow at times. English may be his second language, and it shows. Next time get a better editor -- a very poor job of editing the book was done. Some sentences just run on forever and use a bunch of unneccesary words. This may sound picky, but this type of book is read through entirely and it should be better written and organized.

   I do really like how Jimmy expores different design possibilites. He gives the pros and cons of each option, including the one he proposes. He obviously understands the technologies very well and has much real-world experience. You can tell he is an experienced developer.

   So remember, this is an enterprise design book. If you follow his proposal you will have an application with many layers/tiers that also makes use of COM+ / component services. For smaller applications this type of design is usually overkill. But for very large applications a good design is critical.

   Good book.




3. Some good material in this book that are related to N-tier design, but not a .Net book at all. Less than %20 of the book had anything to do with .Net. It looks like the book was written 2 years ago and then .Net was added to the title to better market the book. I had to return mine.



4. If you are looking for a book that gives you a blueprint for building a scalable enterprise database application using the .NET framework and SQL Server 2000 then this book hands it to you on a plate.

   Don't buy this book if you are looking to learn Visual Basic .NET or SQL Server because this one is all about applying those basic skills taught in other books to produce a "real" application.

   Most books on this subject fit the 80:20 rule, they take you 80% of the way and then ask you to just finish things off yourself. Anyone who is familiar with the 80:20 rule knows that the remaining 20% needed for completion is as much effort again as the first 80%.

   This one introduces, designs and builds a real application to completion, consisting of n-Tier architecture with full transaction control, business rules and data access with concurrency control. It doesn't ignore real world requirements such as performance, debugging and testing.

   The author imparts tips and tricks learned over the years and gives you a working example of one of the most important design patterns in database access, "Batch Command" (sometimes referred to as "Unit of Work"). This pattern minimises multiple trips to the database by compiling separate SQL statements into a single script that is send and executed in a single call. All code examples are in VB.NET and are accompanied by UML diagrams where appropriate.

   In summary this book fits hand in hand with Microsoft's .NET data access strategy and basically hands you the design, implementation notes and source code of a working, scalable, enterprise class application on a plate.
   
   Well worth it!




5. This book should have been entitled "Design of Enterprise Systems with emphasis on Stored Procedures". It really has little to do with VisualBasic or .NET, and more to do with proper large application design in the OO/SQL era.

   The author is obviously obsessed with Stored Procedures and makes a very good case for using them. In his systems, every application deals only with stored procedures and never performs SQL statements directly. Well, that's one way of doing it, but it introduces a whole lot of problems that were never really discussed too clearly.

   The book is an excellent resource not just for the theory but for practical code snippets you can [take] and use in your next huge, huge enterprise application.

   I say "huge, huge", because the sheer amount of overhead you will create in developing any applications based on this architecture is astounding. For anyone who started programming in COBOL, welcome to the world of Microsoft object-oriented programming! You will be spending 90% of your time worrying about coding things that have absolutely nothing to do with the application! Do we really want our application subject matter experts to have to worry about Shared Properties Managers, Object Construction, Threads, Object Pooling? Well, we have no choice if we go with .NET under Microsoft.
   
   If you've stepped away from VisualBasic for a couple of years, welcome back to the new world of Microsoft's vision for a single language with many names. They call it VisualBasic now, but it's just C wearing a mask. Forget about rapid coding. Forget about type-independence. Forget about functions and subroutines. You're going to be spending most of your time memorizing the wall chart of COM objects and trying to learn yet another incarnation of VB that is as incompatible with the previous version as Java is with Fortran.

   Don't believe me? OK, use Visual Studio.NET to write a simple application that looks up a record in a table and says "Hello World".

   But I digress. The book's treatment of error handling, trace logging, concurrency locking, and other oft-neglected issues is very good and gives practical advice on how to do it. I will personally implement many of his suggestions. Many others I will pare down into a more manageable architecture for a company that does not have a multi-million dollar IPO worth of cash to burn through in the next 12 months.

   His critical analysis at the end of each chapter of the proposal presented in that chapter, on the basis of performance, scalability, portability, maintainability, reusability, testability, debuggability, interoperability, and other "ities" was very clever. I will use that, as well as "codability", "readability", "longevity", and "learning curve" to help evaluate what language I want to use in my next application. It might show an MS OO language to be the worst choice. Who knows?

   2 pet peeves:

   1. "Preventive" is the correct word. There is no such thing as "Preventative", because we do not preventate things. Wonder how that slipped past the spell checker that SURELY every writer nowadays has.

   2. "Errand" is running to the store to get something. "Errant" is something that has gone wrong. The entire sample application is built on a misuse of the word "Errand". But I forgive Jimmy because he is Swedish, and if I had to write a technical book in any of my 2nd languages, I would be hard pressed to get absolutely everything right.

   Good job, Jimmy.

No comments about Visual Basic 4: Performance Tuning and Optimization.

5 comments about Using Visual Basic with AutoCAD.

1. This book was not the reference I was looking for. It introduces how to use visual basic for autocad and then goes into how to interface excel, word, and other applications with autocad. It fails to give examples of complex object manipulation in autocad and just gives one or two paragraph explainations of some of the most complicated and important methods. I also found the index to be too sparse. It just didn't give enough examples of complicated procedures in autocad and I would think this is what most people want to know about. All in all a disappointment.



2. This book provides a good base for someone starting out programming AutoCAD with VBA. It assumes you know AutoCAD, but have only limited experience with Visual Basic. It provides some helpful examples on exchanging data with other VBA-enabled products, such as those in Microsoft Office, and also shows you how to "drive" AutoCAD with stand-alone VB. A few more complex applications would have been helpful, but it will definitely get you up and running.



3. Andrew Roe's book provides experienced AutoCAD users with the right amount and complexity of material to start creating visual basic programs for many useful tasks. It is very well targeted to beginning visual basic developers that are already familiar with AutoCAD. This allows the book to bypass redundant and tiresome sections on basic CAD skills and get right to the meat of VB and VBA programming. The sections on crossing application boundaries, while very basic, are especially useful. I would recommend this book to all cad users and managers who need a succinct text to help them begin implementing Visual Basic in their offices.



4. Overall a great book for VB beginners. A good guide when used with the "sparse" Autocad online help. This book is geared toward cad administrators and not people new to Autocad. The book only covers the very basics and really needs an advanced section. I think the price was a bit steep and should be along the 25$ range for so few pages. This book gave me a good start writing VB-Autocad apps, the rest I filled in the blanks. I wonder if the weak online documentation about VB in Autocad was due to Autodesk's book. I hope someone writes a complete book with a little theory about the most efficient way to use Visual Basic to access and manipulate information/elements in Autocad. This book did have easy to understand information available nowhere else for getting started with VB for Autocad.



5. While this book was a very good start, I was fairly dissappointed with where the book stopped. I was really looking for more complex object manipluation with AutoCAD objects, and the book being only 400 pages long gives half of its focus to interacting with Microsoft OLE. If anyone is looking to become a real Visual Basic programmer with AutoCAD, I would recommend this book, but only as an accompanying text to a more complete book. Users should beware that the sample files do not reflect standard object naming conventions. There are some very good and useful exercises that I have gone back to as a reference. In short, this book is very useful.

2 comments about Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET.

1. Say "peer-to-peer" to the average person and you might get a snide remark about downloading music and the RIAA. But MacDonald makes it very clear that p2p is far more than copyright infringement. He points out, for one thing, that the early design of the Internet itself posits a p2p network.
   
   This book is well suited for those of you who might be interested in designing novel p2p applications on the dominant desktop environment. MacDonald gives a good summary of previous p2p applications, like Napster, Freenet and Gnutella. Important because if you are going to innovate, you need to know the prior art. He develops several simple p2p examples, like a file sharer and a messaging system. He shows how to use various VB.NET utilities to handle the networking, freeing you from coding low level details. More efficient use of your time. Of course, the hardest part of the problem is still left to you. Finding and designing a novel and compelling application. This book gives you the tools in VB to do that.
   
   One important lesson from the book is that there are degrees of purity in p2p systems. Sometimes, it makes sense to do a pragmatic compromise and have some superpeers that function mostly as servers to the other peers. A p2p hardline developer might decry this, but if it works for you, go ahead. Hopefully, one effect of this book might be to help alter the perception that p2p = illicit.
   
   [Sidenote: For a bloke who studied theoretical physics, his maths slips. He says IPv6 will support 1 trillion machines = 10^12. Actually, much, much more. 2^128 ~ 10^36.]



2. This book is a great starting point if you want to explore how to set up your own peer to peer network. It walks you through how to set up a file sharing program, an instant messenger, and a shared computing system. However, it leaves out what I believe to be one of the most important aspects of peer to peer programming - NAT traversal. The book deals with this subject in a very superficial way by telling you to seek out 3rd party solutions instead of showing you how to do it yourself - leaving you to figure out the details of this subject on your own. This would have been a 5 star book if this subject had been covered in greater detail.
   
   I have found that NAT traversal is possible by implementing UDP hole punching techniques. However, I have not found any explanation for how to do it with .Net....yet.

1 comments about The basic handbook: Encyclopedia of the basic computer language.

1. If you are translating from an old BASIC on one system to a different system or to a modern BASIC this book will be invaluable. Its coverage is comprehensive - both of the main families (HP and Microsoft) as well as many variant forms of BASIC can be found here. This is NOT a textbook - it is intended for an experienced programmer who needs a reference for an extinct dialect. Each command and function is listed alphabeticly with the system that used it and what it does.

1 comments about .NET Framework Programmer's Reference.

1. Unfortunately, this book isn't near as good as Dan's previous VB6 Reference. A truly useful .NET framework reference can't be squeezed into 400 pages, that's a fatal flaw. A reference book DOES NOT have to mean small, it has to mean easy to find information. This book should have had more example code, yes, which would have added more pages, perhaps 100 or so. SO WHAT! Again, reference means easy to find, not concise to the point of barely helpful. On the other hand, the book does discuss a few topics well, so I gave it three stars.

No comments about JavaScript: A Programmer's Companion from Basics through DHTML.

5 comments about Instant SQL Server 2000 Applications.

1. I now posess five (5) of Mr. Buczek's books. In this book, as in all the rest, it remains evident that Greg has a genuine concern that the reader learn from his printed material and urges further learning by manipulating solutions that he has presented.

   Chapter 1 does a great job of reviewing the basics of working with SQL Server and the SQL Server Enterprise Manager. As a programmer, I have designed an application using VB as the front end to SQL Server. Chapter 3 provided invaluable information.

   I found the Solutions provided by Mr. Buczek as real-world, and code examples were easily transposed to meet my programming needs.

   The Visual Basic Quick Reference in Appendix A and the T-SQL Language Reference in Appendix B are more than worth the price of this book. I will be eagerly waiting for the next release from Mr. Buczek.




2. The strength of this book is that is teaches through examples, and for someone like myself who knows a little about SQL and needs concrete examples to solidify understanding, this is an excellent resource. Mr. Buczek does an excellent job of breaking down the code in his examples and explaining what each line does. The book also has a good introduction through the first several chapters that help you get your feet wet if you have done little with SQL Server before.



3. This book is unbelievable! I had been looking for a book explaining stored procedures. I had bought four or five books on SQL Server but they turned out to be very disappointing: only one chapter on stored procedures and only examples that were less than convincing on the use of stored procedures.

   This book shows you real life examples where stored procedures are used. I understood right away what other authors were trying to explain.

   Mr. Buczek's book consists of small but complete real life applications. By using complete projects, we understand how and why using stored procedures.

   But the book is not only about stored procedures; using defined functions and triggers are also used.

   What makes this book stand-out among other books on SQL Server, is the coupling of SQL Server with a user interface: each applications use an interface: some of Mr. Buczek applications use VB6, others use VB.Net (beta 1: at that time VB.Net beta 2 had not been launched), others use Access and others use ASP pages.

   This is the book you need if you are tired, as I am, to throw your money through the windows by buying computing books that are written by people who should never have written books at all.

   As far as I am concerned, Mr. Buczek is the only person who desserves the right to write computer books. He is the only one who knows what he is doing.




4. I purchased this book more for the quick and dirty SQL applications than for the detailed 'How-To'. Unfortunately some code examples were created with a very early version of Visual Studio.NET. The code is now obsolete, so you must spend a fair amount of time repairing the code and bringing it up to the latest VisualStudio.NET conventions. Even then you might not get it working. I wish the publisher would make code corrections and errata available on their web site, but they do not.



5. I bought this book hoping that I as a hobbyist I would get some insight on how real database programs look and work. I program exclusively in Visual Basic .Net and only care to use SQL Server 2000 at this time. So, the description mentioned using .Net and I thought I had found what I was looking for. I was wrong.
   
   First, while some of the examples in the book use VB.Net, it is based on the beta version. A lot has changed since the beta versions, and this book really needs to reflect those changes.
   
   Secondly, all of the examples use the old way of connecting to and working with the database, i.e., ADO. With .Net has come a new and more effective (in my opinion) way of handling database interactivity, which is ADO.Net. I have no need for the old way of doing things. To leave ADO.Net out of this book just seems lazy to me. This is my main disappointment.
   
   Lastly, six chapters are devoted to using Access as a front end. This is why I believe the title is misleading. While many people use Access for this purpose, I do not and would have liked to know that one third of this book was devoted to this topic.
   
   For the most part, this book is filled with a lot of examples and information. Unfortunately, it falls short with the newer .Net technologies. If you want to use up to date technologies, this book is probably not for you. Unless you want to take the time to port all of the code from ADO to ADO.Net and from beta coding standards to current standards. Otherwise, it might be a good investment.

5 comments about Visual Basic .NET Unleashed.

1. The authors seems to know what he is talking about and
   the code looks good. However the downloadable code for
   this book does not carry the code to call any of the scripts
   in his book.
   A separate script is needed and
   needs to be written by the reader to call each script and
   basically test if his vb.net scripts are execute and run successfully.

   This approach forces hands-on approach but seeing how large
   the .net framework is, my money would have been better spent
   on another book.

   With the effort required by this book, it could end up to be
   a waste of time if his code doesn't work in the end.

   This must be one of the worst books I have purchased ...




2. This is a good book for covering the actual language of vb.net (classes, delegates etc). There isn't much content on creating win or web forms or ado.net for that matter. You will need a separate book if you want to learn these techniques.



3. The Title says "Visual Basic .Net Unleashed"... what a title? if you want to learn Visual Basic .Net, don't buy this book. Can we use definitions in writing programs? I don't think so. I bought this book because of its title but when i started reading it, its only full of definitions, less examples.



4. you have to be kidding me. how do you have a book called "unleashed" and then not even go into any database usage? i dont think i have ever had to write an application that did not include some type of database usage, yet the author does not even cover it. nor does he go into forms in any detail except when it comes to web forms. where are the 2 pages it would have taken to detail how to populate a listBox? i bought this book off a sidewalk vendor for half price and i got ripped off.



5. It doesn't matter if you're coding windows applications or web applications, this book is for you because web programmers ultimately have to know the VB.NET language! It doesn't matter if you're coding .NET 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0, this book is for you...at least until they come out with version 2. This book has taught me so much about the new OOP for VB.NET with real world explanations in a concise manor. Highly recommended even if you are one of those "I know it all, I don't need books" coder...don't be ridiculous...get this book, it's a great reference.
   
   As another person I see in their review stated that this book lacked info on databases. This book is about the VB.NET language, not Databases! If you want more about VB.NET with Databases, that's what ASP.NET books are for!!! I can recommend many for that but this book as it's labeled is for VB.NET, the LANGUAGE!!! common people...lets wake up here.
   
   I don't have money to waste and buy my books carefully..ones that I definitely will use and this is one of them I've used a lot.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic .NET in 24 Hours.

1. This is a pleasant book (but now the wrong edition) for the beginner with no prior VB experience. Teaching is done via many VERY SIMPLE projects, and these cannot be done without Visual Studio. You want to buy the latest version "Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 (VB .NET) in 24 Hours Complete Starter Kit" which includes a DVD with a trial version of the latest Visual Studio.

   Projects are all for Windows Forms projects including one session on automating Excel (from a Windows form). Visual Basic.NET's most exciting use for many is for the code behind ASP.NET Web Forms when developing applications with a web browser user interface. The author does mention such use very briefly but offers no examples. There are many fine introductory books at this same beginner level on VB.NET and ASP.NET; so if web applications are where you are headed, this book will not be the best choice.

   This book might be nice easy step up for someone moving from the Excel macro (VB for Applications, VBA) world into more general applications. If you are a professional but new to VB, the book can be completed in a week end; and you can then pass it on to a kid just getting into programming. As noted by another reader, the description of the language is too brief to give this book value as a reference.

   Author James Foxall has many books to his credit and writes nicely. For the most part he eschews the silliness of many professionals writing "down" for beginners. There are a surprising number of editing mistakes, but nearly all of the code runs as presented.




2. Those looking to start programming in VB will find this book very useful. The chapters are arranged in a logical manner so that the user will build upon knowledge from previous chapters. The author explains things in easy to understand terms, anyone could learn to start using VB with this book.



3. This book (unlike many others on the same subject) does NOT assume any previous knowledge of Visual Basic and helps the reader on the journey to learning vb.net with ease.It is well written in easy to understand terms and has me wanting to move on to the next stage already.The many examples in this book also provide a very good reference library for future use.



4. I hadn't programmed in years so I bought four books in an attempt to get a handle on VB.net. Of the four, this is the book I used to learn the basics. Lessons are easy to follow and understand. Sample programs are simple but I am already using knowledge from them to write my own code. Highly recommend.



5. This book is great. The author has a way of explaining VB in a very understanding way. I got this book for under $3.00 new! It was the best $3.00 I spent this year!