2 comments about More Visual Basic 5 for Windows for Dummies.

1. For a beginner such as myself, learning any type of programming language was about as much of a challenge as it was figuring out how to stop that blinking 12:00 on my VCR-next to impossible.Mr Wang detailed everything in such a well manner I felt like Capt. Picard venturing out on a new frontier. I almost forgot I was reading a book on programming. I learned alot and had a good time. I highly recommend this book!



2. The ...Dummies series of books was a great concept from the beginning. Never before have there been technical references which could just be read for their entertainment value alone. Beware of ...Dummies books not in the computer genre, they are mediocre at best. This one however proudly continues the heritages started by Dan Gookin in being informative, technical but not more than is neccessary, and allowing you to start from a point where "computer" is still a word to be looked up in your dusty Webster.

No comments about Solaris 10 Installation Guide Basic Installations.

No comments about Fundamentals of ADO.NET.

1 comments about Vbscript by Example.

1. A general overview of VBScript. Definately not the best book. If you are used to books like Professional Active Server Pages (Wrox) or JavaScript for the World Wide Web (Peachpit Press), you will be sorely disappointed by this book. One good thing about it is that it gives review questions at the end of every chapter, which I liked, but as far as information goes, it is not the best.

No comments about Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2008 in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself -- Days).

No comments about Wiley Pathways Introduction to Programming using Visual Basic (Wiley Pathways).

5 comments about VB Shell Programming (Visual Basic).

1. Visual Basic and Shell Extension? I thought it should be Visual C++'s territory. The book proves Visual Basic can do anything as Visual C++ can. It might take more works to finish the same task compared to Visual C++ but the experience is simply rewarding and fun.



2. A must read for those who like to push VB beyond the limits, previously viewed as 'impossible to do in VB'. Very well organized and lots of examples.

   Excellent reference material and a worthly investment.




3. First off, if all what you want to do is to add an icon to the systray, go find _any_ Win32 API book or even search on the web. This book does not cover simple tricks like this. But if you want to write your own namespace extensions or property sheet handlers, read on.

   Many people think VB and windows shell programming don't mix very well. Honestly, I was one of them. But after reading this great introduction, I figured I was wrong. Well, mostly wrong.

   There are two issues that make shell programming hard in VB:

   (1) As in most "advanced VB programming tasks", the first realization must be you _can't_ do it in pure VB. You need to import Win32 APIs and then fake you are writing your program in C. But that's a very old and well-solved problem, and in fact this book assumes you know how to do it: it shows the import statements without explaining how to get them. But that's fine, for I think most advanced VB programmers have already picked up this old trick.

   (2) The windows shell is built heavily on COM, so must be the shell extensions. But this book is not about writing COM servers in VB... Apparently the author did not expect the readers to know COM before, so he offered a short chapter on COM basics that I find too short to be sufficient for the purpose of this book. For example, later on he started using jargons like "in-process COM servers" and "apartment threaded" (these are COM jargons) without explaining what they are. I tried to look up these terms in the index to quote the page number. They are absent---yet another proof of insufficient coverage of COM. I admit that shell extensions are in-process COM servers and so in most cases the readers are not expected to do anything else anyway, but this kind of treatment much weakens a reader's understanding of what he/she is doing.

   And there are other problems that plague this almost excellent book:

   (1) There is no separate treatment of what should the programmer do when a new shell extension comes out. As an example, icon overlay is not covered in this book. I think this is really the major reason I have to take half a star off: this book is more like "how I wrote those shell extensions" rather than "how you can write your own ones". For example, it does show many examples of how to turn a given IDL into more VB friendly, but not how can the programmer obtain the IDL of an interface that's not covered in the book. (OLE View won't answer all such prayers. Go check the platform SDK or, _cough_, wait for the second edition of the book to have a new chapter on that extension. :P)

   (2) There is no coverage of debugging shell extensions. It's not as easy as one may expect, especially as VB will automatically re-register your COM servers when you execute your code while Explorer loads some registry entries only once...

   Overall, this is a more than decent introduction to shell programming using VB. If you want to do some typical shell programming like having your own property sheet or namespace extensions, then this book is really good for the job and is worth every single penny. I would rather say it's 4.5 star, but I have to round down for the minor problems I mentioned.




4. I particularly like the Shell Extension part which is very
   useful to understand somthing more advanced in Windows Shell.

   However, what disappoints me is that I found the sample codes from
   Chap 11 (Both sample projects DemoSpace and RegSpace) crash in
   machines running Win2K. This means that if you want to use the
   techniques taught from the book to implement a Shell Extension
   by VB, you can only support platforms below Win2K. That will not
   be much useful at all.

   As far as I know, the author has not yet figured a solution
   (through private communications with Orielly's book support).




5. I have a love hate relationship with this book. There are a lot of useful techniques spelled out in the book, unfortunately there are serious bugs in the demo code. I have been able to fix a few of them, but am still working on others. Maybe this was on purpose to get the reader to truly understand the code rather than blindly copy it.

1 comments about Modern Compiler Implementation in C: Basic Techniques.

1. This book provides a great overview of compiler-writing in general, with excellent discussions of issues like parsing, code generation, register allocation, and optimizations. This particular version (the C version) of the book, however, seems to contain a lot of typos in the code samples -- even without a compiler, I could see that most of them will not compile. If you can figure out what he meant, however, the algorithms are very sound.

4 comments about Visual Basic .NET Solutions Toolkit: 30 Practical Components for .NET.

1. The solutions are great, if only they worked in real life and not in theory!.

   The Auto Deploy just doesn't work (returns an error that there is not information for!) and the Application Settings writer is great in theory but in reality its easier to use the registry setting to achieve and easier to implement the result in a large scale development....

   Conclusion...don't waste your money...




2. When I first got this book I thought it was a pretty innovative idea for a book and skimmed through it but didn't put it to much use initially.

   A couple of projects later, I've used around ten components from the book with a couple more slated for the next project I'll be doing. In dollars, that's huge.

   All of my projects were done in C#, so I can't comment on the whether or not the source is 100%, however everything is explained well enough that even the most junior developer will be able to work around any problem, should any arise.

   All in all I would recommend this book to anyone.

   (Note to Wrox, let's get some equivalent C# books out!)




3. This book makes good on it's promise to present a compelling collection of components for us to use in development. It does so in a very logical way, explaining what each portion of the component does and how it works. The solutions presented are practical, well thought out, and generic enough to CUSTOMIZE to your need. The beauty of this book is it gives you many new tools to use in enterprise windows/web application development while at the same time leaving an extensible open architecture. Anyone who criticizes a book because it doesn't offer 100% turn-key code reuse should be slapped. All others should BUY THIS BOOK!!



4. I wish there was a return policy. The book covered a lot of material but there wasn't anything new to learn from it. You would be better off spending your money on a .NET magazine subscription. Anything that was written in this book can be found on the web and won't cost you anything.

No comments about Microsoft Quickbasic: An Introduction to Structured Programming/Book and Disk.