2 comments about Special Edition Using Borland C++ (Using ... (Que)).

1. The very first program you try to compile and debug tells you that you "Can't debug 16 bit executables." This is because Borland C++ 5 uses the 32 bit debugger as the default. You can compile the example programs and use the 16 bit debugger, but it doesn't allow the ease of use intended for the IDE.



2. Seeing the book rated for "Accomplished" programmers, I thought this would be a great way to learn Windows programming (since I already knew C++ itself). This is a very thick book that spends fully 1/2 of the volume with a C++ tutorial (well written). Then, suddenly, the example programs become Windows applications without much discussion on **what is going on**. Nothing on Windows specific programming is found until page 629, where a discussion of the Grapics Device Interface ensues. I found the Windows section to be very vauge. If I want to learn how to use the Integrated Development Environment, I can read the User's Guide that came with the compiler. This book might be a good reference for C++, and possibly for some advanced Windows programming concepts, but it is certainly not good for learning Windows programming with the OWL library

No comments about Netwarriors in C++: Programming Multiplayer Games for Windows.

No comments about PC Learning Labs Teaches Microsoft Access 2.0/Book and Disk (P C Learning Labs).

5 comments about Developing Applications with Visual Studio.NET (DevelopMentor Series).

1. Updated Review:
   After a year of programming real world projects with .NET, I had to change my opinion on this book. As the author acknowledges, there is ALOT of existing C++ code and libraries. Trying to port existing code or using Interop techniques is not always the best solution. I'm glad to have a reference to Managed C++ that helps me compile C++ solutions to .NET(I would like to see a tiny bit more on mixed mode, c runtime linking, and C++ idioms that Just Don't Work). I still believe this is not the simplest book for learning C#, but those books have become a dime a dozen. This book is one you'll be glad if you need to using existing software.
   Original Review:
   Ok, I'm a C++ developer that has a hard time stomaching what MS has done to my beloved language. However, I am very interested in the .NET initiative( and C# ) and wanted to get the perspective of a C++ expert, especially one with a COM background. I read this book and found it quite good, except for the examples in "Managed C++"( in which there were many ). Granted, I was warned, but seeing C++ twisted like that reminded me of Bilbo's line ...butter scraped over too much bread... . The "Managed C++" examples were truly distracting. The author had to explain why the plumbing overhead, we learned to detest in COM, now exists in every line of code in "Managed C++"( my words, not his ).



2. The book really comes from the perspective of a Win32/C++ developer. I would not recommend this book, unless you have come from this background, or really want to understand some of the internals of .Net (and are really willing to spend some time in it). It also only really covers Visual C# and Visual C++.Net (managed and unmanaged).
   Overall it is a quality book that offers a lot of insight into the world of .Net. It requires one to read it a few times through to really get the details as Grimes has a tendency to dig deep into details that may not make sense at the time.
   The organization is fair but could use a lot of work as the chapter layout seems a little disjointed. There could also be many more examples in the book. The book provides an adequate number of examples, but could use more.
   The first few chapters really spend a lot of time digging into the framework. Many times Grimes leads one deep down a path (such as boxing and unboxing) and others he refers to another chapter later (such as exception handling etc). It's a decent overview of .Net but requires one to read it over a few times. Many times it delves into the inner workings of .Net that might not be easy to grasp the first time through.
   The second chapter starts looking at the framework classes, and gives a healthy overview of .Net's offering. Chapter 3 gets into .Net remoting and context. Overall I think chapter 2 and 3 are probably the best of the book.
   Chapter four concerns itself with COM interop and COM+. This chapter is a good overview of what was done before and how it works in .Net. It is a necessary chapter, but I for one kinda glossed over it. The price of interop tends to be fairly high and to be avoided wherever possible. I think this is a great chapter, though, as I am sure I will need to do this at some point and this will be a good reference.
   Chapters 5 and 6 concern themselves with Visual Studio .Net and how to build applications. Pretty good chapters, especially if you have not become familiar with the IDE yet. The section on tools and external tools are very important.
   Chapter 7 is all about Visual C++.Net (managed and unmanaged). I think this is really a highlight as there are not many good books on Visual C++.Net. Grimes does an excellent job of describing the enhancements to Visual C++ and some features that have been widely ignored (ATL Server and Visual C++ unmanaged).
   Chapter 8 provides an excellent overview of application development. Unfortunately the book does not cover ADO.Net or ASP.Net, but it makes up for it by covering many tricky areas of development like localization, and logging mechanisms.
   Chapter 9 covers debugging. I wish this chapter was actually longer, but It does a good job of showing debugging techniques for .Net. This chapter is an absolute must read for any developer, as debugging techniques can not be over stressed.
   Overall I think the book is very detailed and it should be in any serious developer's library. This is definitely not a beginer's book and does not cover many aspects of .Net development that are almost essential. Windows Forms, Remoting are covered lightly but really almost requires a book in and of itself to describe it correctly. I recommend this book, but be careful to do a self evaluation before you dive in. I have seen many senior developers read this book and not understand any of it. It is very clear about it's target audience being of a Visual C++ background, and it is not lying. I think it provides the best book for introducing those developers into .Net. Hope you enjoy this book, too. -- Reviewed by Mathew U.



3. This is a gem of a book that is packed with insights not readily found elsewhere. Chapter 3 ('Context & Remoting') perfectly distills the subject in about 90 pages with clear code snippets. Chapter 2 on the FCL was well done (over 120 pages) with good code examples. The chapters on VS (IDE) was not extraordinary but acceptable. The frosting of the book was Chapter 7 on Managed C++, quote "It is time to return to my true love, C++". Ditto.



4. I'm a big fan of both the DevelopMentor series (from Addison Wesley) and Richard Grimes' previous books, so I was very anxious to read this book. It was all the more disappointing, then, that I didn't particularly like it.

   Mr. Grimes' previous books were very straight-forward and task-oriented. I'm constantly lending my copies to other programmer's to reference how to implement something in C++/COM. This book is not task-oriented (not that there's anything wrong with that). However, it didn't really work for me as a theory-oriented book either. Often, it seems to dive down into obscure detail on some feature that I didn't feel had been adaquately introduced. I would have preferred shedding some detail on some of the more obscure topics in favor of more complete examples.

   I managed to make myself read the first 500 pages or so (always thinking that things would become better in the next chapter), but it was like pulling teeth. Finally, I set it aside and moved onto a different book (the excellent "Essential ADO.Net").




5. The difficult thing about this book for me is that I do hope that I can avoid C# all of my life and C# and C++ are given about equal time throughout this book. As the author points out on page 561, "C# is a wonderful language, but it often leaves you wondering if you can do more, and when you discover that you have reached the limits of the language, you realize it is time to get back to C++." Haven't we had enough of Visual Basic, and Java? Now C#? Why not C++? Why do we have to wade through explanations for both C# and C++ on every subject. If we spent as much time on a real language like C++ as we have spent over the years becoming multilingual we could be C++ masters. I always remember that, other things being equal, faster is better. And I have never seen any other language except Assembler come close to the speed of execution of C and C++. This book would be better if it were two different books - one addressing C++ only and one addressing any other would-be language.

   In the Summary of Chapter 7, Mr. Grimes states that "All in all, C++ is the language for .NET development, and I hope that you, like me, will recover from a brief flirtation with other .NET languages and return to the best language for the job: C++."

   In Chapter 8, Application Development, Mr. Grimes elects to disregard his own advice and gives every single example in C#. How quickly hope for a return to sanity was dashed!

3 comments about Programming in C++ (Dg - Computer Programming).

1. This book is an exelent way to learn C++ but it is a little bit slow. The first program isn't until Chapter 3, but it is intresting to learn about the history of computers. Great book for AP Computer Programing or IB computer studies.



2. This book is an exelent way to learn C++ but it is a little bit slow. The first program isn't until Chapter 3, but it is intresting to learn about the history of computers. Great book for AP Computer Programing or IB computer studies.



3. This book offers a wide range of topics but does not go into great detail on any of them. It presents the syntax and says, "Now use it," often without explaining fully what is going on (the section about pointers is terrible). It touches on too many topics and thereby skimps on details. The examples of code given in the book are not always the most efficient. In the book's section on searching I reduced the search time for one of the algorythms (it gave a poor example of a selection-sort) by an incredible amount of time by simply moving an assignment statement to a different part of the loop. Not a good book with which to learn by example.

5 comments about Creating Lightweight Components with ATL.

1. I agree to one of other reviewers: The auther got a good balance among explanatory text, diagrams, screen snapshots, and example code.

   When I read this book, I keep asking myself how this guy knows so many details!




2. This isn't the most famous nor the most recommended of ATL books (compared to ATL Internals and Richard Grimes's books), but I recommend it highly. I don't plan to become an ATL or COM expert any time soon, and I quickly found information here that wasn't available (or wasn't as well explained) in other sources.

   This book helped me a lot in creating an Automation-compatible enumeration interface that VB can use with its "for each" construct, and testing this interface from C++ (which can be complicated).

   It's not a classic (only classics deserve 5 stars), but it's been of sound practical use to me, and that's high praise indeed.




3. I found numerous errors in the sample source, and not all the referenced projects were included on the CD. To top it off, in the one chapter I really needed, only the most basic project was included, and I couldn't glean everything else I needed from the text. Only buy this book if your dining room table needs a 2" shim.



4. This book is a breeze to read, the author made it as much as a no brainer as possible. Unlike books written on the same subject by Wrox, which is extremely dry. The beginner's topic on STL and the usage of STL libraries is a great starter for those who are not familiar with template programming. Fundamental topics like string handling, data type manipulation however should warrant a topic in itself, rather than being grouped together as a sub section. Eg. Safe Arrays, Variant Type, OLE/BSTRs strings and its many conversions. However it is still easy enough to pick up from the tons of examples that's available. The author also made sure that concepts like Smart Pointers and the different ways to initialize a COM object is clarified early to the reader.

   Sadly, the topic on NT services was short, as the author has made it clear that they didn't want to cover it much. However should the author come up with a whole book dedicated to NT Services, MMC Snap-In development I would be the first to get it!

   The topis covered on OLE-DB and the ADO object are adequate and a whole lot better compared to the many books out there that hardly even talk about it - why develop in COM if you're not going to use the database?. There's also a smattering of information such as NT's handling of security and persisting data from COM.

   This book is well worth your time and money. Can't wait to get the .NET version! (Hopefully, ATL is still around by then)




5. I have had this book for close to 3 years now. When I bought it I was just getting into c++ so it was kind of difficult but as I got more comfortable with the language I started to appreciate this book for what it is. This is a good buy for anyone who wants to go into ATL programming. I was especially happy with the coverage of connection points structured storage and enumerators/collections.

   The coverage of these topics was a great help when I was developing a DOM and SAX implemantation for an XML parser I am writing.

   However considering the .NET move in today's world this book may become a dinosaur soon but for anybody who needs to write ATL code, this is a great buy.

   "ATL internals" is propably the best ATL book though.

5 comments about Microsoft ASP.NET Programming with Microsoft Visual C#(TM) .NET Deluxe Learning Edition (Pro-Developer).

1. Like most programming books I have read in the last few years, I keep a pencil in hand and correct several things per chapter. Admittedly, I have only completed through Chapter 4 at this time. There are several places in the book where it is obvious that it was not originally written using C#. The most glaring of these is on page 81 where the authors attempt to explain zero-based counting and how to avoid off by one errors - and fail horribly. They get it completely backwards. I'm hoping that the sections on ASP.NET are better than those on C#.



2. This book leaves much to be desired. Although most code samples work in this book, almost all of them needed code syntax fixes. It is very apparent that this book was originally written with VB.NET in mind. There are entire sections that are not applicable to C#. Semi-colons are missing frequently. Unbalanced curly braces appear in the code. In chapter 3, the code didn't translate well when the authors copied and pasted it in. All of the quotation marks show up as question marks. (Sounds like MS Word's smart quotes...) Lastly, some screenshots mislead the reader. One example will not work unless you vary from the screenshot.

   From what I can tell, MS was so bent on getting an ASP.NET programming book like this out that they spent very little fixing small errors like these. Get a WROX or O'Reilly book instead.




3. I was amazed that they released this book with this many errors. An idiot could have done a quick proof of the book before printing and would have found loads of errors. Why is there no errata section on the mspress web site? Are they embarassed to list dozens (hundreds perhaps) of errors? I would certainly return it if it had a money back guarantee. I guess the authors think that professional programmers have plenty of time to waste trying to figure out their mistakes. If Microsoft is going to put their name on a book like this, they should at least hire a team to make sure the book doesn't have glaring errors!



4. I'm reviewing just the book here, not the book plus software; right now there is no entry for the book by itself.

   As someone who is already familiar with programming and C#, I had hoped that this book would get me going on ASP.NET. Unfortunately, the author makes the opposite assumptions. So he casually mentions that you should have IIS running, but includes a whole chapter on C# constructs (just in case I didn't know what a "while" statement is). The same pattern is followed throughout the book: loads of trivial junk that I needed to slog through, because they conceal some crucial information. It took me 15 minutes just to put a label on a web form when it was in FlowLayout. The author did explain that you need to DOUBLE click to accomplish this, but the information was buried under a discussion of how to use the VS IDE (including what a Save icon looks like!) - something I've been doing for years.

   Perhaps if you know all about ASP and know nothing about C#, then this is the book for you. Perhaps. Otherwise, it's not even worth a look.




5. ok......I am newbie, but I have both ASP and Java experience. The only reason I gave it two stars is because it atleast glances all the functions of ASP.NET (with mild examples). But now I am trying to do some of the exercises from chapter-3, and my results did not match his results in the book at all! I thought I did it wrong, but after a looking at the codes for a bit.....HE got the whole damm thing upside down. And in the book it says, do this and do that....but what the hell am I supposed to do when EVERYTHING is already typed in (full of errors). He says....type this code...I was gonna go type, but it was already written! I didnt spend all this money to look at his damm codes, I wanna write and learn. This book and the materials needs a lot of debugging!
   
   Buy the book if someones sells it for 3 bucks and free shipping!
   Shaf

1 comments about Objective-C: Object-Oriented Programming Techniques.

1. A good book is one that can teach novices well. Shop, read, pay no further. This book is it.

No comments about 1.001 Trucos Para DOS y P.C..

2 comments about Your First C/C++ Program.

1. This book, or may I say a tutorial, is written specially for beginners. You will quickly learn the most fundamental basics of C and programming in whole, and will finish with a decent knowledge of C/C++. The book explains everything in plain English, and although it doesn't touch any graphics programming, it clearly explains structures, pointers, disk operations and more, the basics needed to for you to start programming in C. No super-advanced tricks, no super-complex things, staight down and clear explanations.
   
   As an experienced C/C++ programmer, who learned C/C++ without any books, I can say that "Your First C/C++ Program" is an excellent tutorial for beginners and people who don't know anything about programming at all. Get this gem today!
   
   Oleg Rekutin



2. This book was, probably, born based on misperceiving the relation between C and C++. A book that tries to teach you both C and C++ is as successful as a book that will try to teach you both English and French based on the fact that their alpha-beth matches 90% (and the syntax of C matches that of C++ by less than 50%, I guess). I do not know how much C or C++ the author knows - but no much is shown in the book, to my view. In short, it is my opinion that you will neither learn C from this book, nor will you learn C++.