5 comments about MFC Internals: Inside the Microsoft(c) Foundation Class Architecture.

1. Are you still amazed what's going on behind the scenes? If yes, buy this! It's a great book to enjoy exploration of MFC. Navigate with it and then try yourself. You'll probably find America... I would say, authors have taken a great pain to construct such a good material.



2. This book is the best book for MFC and what it does inside. This is not an introductory book and if you are new to MFC you'd be better served by reading Kruglinki's Programming Visual C++.



3. Not suitable for MFC begginers, but very good and informative book for professionals. It is writen in very good manner - it is easy to read and understand even complex topics
   MFC Internals are described in attractive way, so is not boring to read a book.
   So, I like a way the books is writen and I like its content.



4. The difference between this book and Programming Windows with MFC is that while the latter provides a complete reference on how to use MFC, it does not cover much what is going inside MFC. You might ask why should care about how MFC works? If you remember the first time you used MFC, you might remember your astonishment about how quick you could have a working decent application in five minutes just by using the MFC wizard but after that joyful moment, you spent frustrating weeks to figure out how to do add this special feature to your program. Lets face it, the documentation coming with MFC does not tell everything you have to know to fully unleash the power of MFC. The only way to truly understand MFC is to dig in the code (For Star Wars fans, Obi-Wan would say "Use the source, Luke") and this is precisely why Microsoft is providing the MFC source code. MFC source code is huge and might be intimidating at first. This is why having a book to help you in the first steps of your exploration is an excellent idea. Consider having this book as a companion for Programming Windows for MFC. However, this book is not for novices. Only buy it, if you consider yourself good with programming MFC.
   
   If you buy it, very interesting discoveries await you! You can see by yourself by looking my MFC tutorials on my website what the knowledge contained in this book has allowed me to do with MFC.



5. If you are like me (always wanting to know not just the DO but the HOW of classes in MFC) this book is a must, and even used it was in great shape. It fits perfectly with my library of programmer's references.

5 comments about Programming VB .NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers.

1. Of all the books I bought to learn VB NET, this is the one I find myself turning to repeatedly for information on object oriented programming. The author' treatment of inheritance and delegates/events are models of clarity. I also found his treatment of mutithreading to be clearer and far easier to understand than the new Wrox book which was supossedly devoted to threading. If you want a book on the VB NET language you can't do any better than this one!



2. This book simply doesn't have enough information to be named "a guide for EXPERIENCED programmer". It is rather a quick overall introductions. So don't get this book if you need to get some serious work done.



3. I bought this book and several others to prepare myself for the transition from VB6 to VB.NET. I wish they would have covered the disconnected datasets, ADO.NET and ASP.NET in more detail. I would have given it 5 stars if it had.

   Other than that, I feel that it is an excellent resource to prepare a programmer from any background for VS.NET. It does a good job of covering the OOP, Inheritance, Overloading, and multithreading subjects in a concise manner.

   The book also has a web site for errata and source code. Gary Cornell is a good author and it shows in this book he co-authored.

   I have a few Wrox Publishing Books, but my library is starting to collect more an more APRESS books because their style and format is what I expect from a book.

   Wrox does publish some good books also:
   I would also recommend .NET Enterprise Development in VB.NET from Design to Deployment, ISBN 1861006179, (Wrox Publishers)




4. This is a pretty-good book if you base it on the Beta. The chapters on OOP (Chapters 4 - Classes and Objects and 5 - Inheritance and Interfaces) are very long. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 (Event Handling and Delegates)form the heart of this book, but I would have broken them down into smaller chapters. The information in those chapters provide a good introduction to OOP. At times, I felt the authors were hard to follow and found myself re-reading several pages especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall this book probably is about 3 1/2 stars. I am hoping that in the next release of this book that the authors would follow their own advice and break the chapters down into smaller parts. ...



5. The book is primarily designed for experienced Visual Basic developers making the transition to VB.NET. However, it can also be appreciated by other experienced programmers regardless of their programming background.

   The book begins with an introduction to the differences between VB.NET and VB. The next chapter introduces you to the new Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE). You will get a tour of the main windows, and learn how to compile and debug your VB.NET applications. Chapter three teaches the VB.NET syntax. You will learn the VB.NET expressions, operators, and program control flow. The next couple of chapters form the core of the book. These chapters cover object oriented programming and inheritance. VB.NET is the first truly object oriented programming version of VB, and a solid understanding of these new features is essential in taking full advantage of VB.NET's new powers.

   The next few chapters go on the cover important topics such as, event handling, error handling, building user interfaces, input/output streams, and multithreading. The final two chapters give a brief introduction to database access with VB.NET using ADO.NET, and a brief overview of ASP.NET.

   The book provides clear and complete coverage of all topics. It includes many real world code examples which help the reader to better understand all the concepts presented.

5 comments about HTML Goodies (2nd Edition) (Goodies).

1. I cannot say enough about this Joe Burns books. I discovered his website back in the 90's and the book -- HTML Goodies -- came soon thereafter. I am a person who has no formal training in website design, computers, anything technical. With Dr. Burns' tutorials, I learned html, website design, adding graphics, javascript, getting my site online, and everything else I needed to know to design and get my (20+ page) business website active and making money. The best part of all is that Dr. Burns' books and tutorials are written in PLAIN ENGLISH -- no tech degree needed to understand them. If you use this book to learn html, you'll never use any of the quicky code writing software kits. I highly recommend this book, as well as Dr. Burns' books: Beyond HTML Goodies and Javascript Goodies. You'll find these books are worth far more than their current price.



2. Joe Burn's is a unique technical author that writes as if he is talking to you. I recommend this book to anyone-that includes the non-technical folks--interested in setting up his/her own website. WHY? Because this book IS for beginners. It is written in a simple to follow, easy to read style. I wish more technical authors would follow Joe's simple style for their writing. Highly recommended!

   Zev Saftlas, Author of Motivation That Works: How to Get Motivated and Stay Motivated

   PS this book helped me open my own website!




3. I am a work at home mom whom went from no html knowledge to MUCH html knowledge with the help from Joe B's information. I still to this day referance his website whenever I need a refresher on something or want to learn something new. I started my site with a couple pages that was sadly lacking anything 'nice' about it to making that website into a huge site that has well over 100 pages in it and many daily visitors. Anytime someone asks me how I do that, or what's my favorite html site, I always refer them to your site. Thank you for helping me make my site
   what it is today, I would'nt have turned it into a website business for this work at home mom without you! You have MUCH knowledge and I thank you for taking the time to share it with us!

   Christina L.
   www.mommyclassifieds.com




4. Product was received quickly and in the condition described. I will order again in the future.



5. Well, one thing we were not thought in school is the jungle like similiarity of the internet. Anyone venturing into internet marketing or wanting to learn html will be amazed by the terms and jargons. The fun part is that admist all this madness, Joe Burns outweigh them all.
   
   Well, htmlgoodies is not just your ordinary book of study,study and get confuse type of book, it's a fun book as you will not only learn all the html code in a fun loving way, you will also think you where reading a, comedy or theraupetic book(killing stress, laughing and learning on) for free.
   
   Now the best part of the book is this, it takes away the frustration of learning something as alien as html. Trust me on this. As a newbie, is either you find some book like htmgoodies that not only teaches you the jargons and simplify your life by gving you a good dose of laughter or you will end up giving up your dreams of learning html by reading all those too-know-it-all,cramped up information on the net or in some books.
   
   I will recomend htmlgoodies anytime, anywhere. Besides, since am already into this, l mean writing this review, l would like to use this opporturnity to ask Joe Burns which of mad house he escaped from since l will like to be his fans. Am just dying of curiosity. Jesus, that's some book

5 comments about Beginning Object-Oriented ASP.NET 2.0 with VB .NET: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: From Novice to Professional).

1. When this book says it's from Novice to Pro, I expected some advanced notions. It covers many topics, but very briefly. It is not a bad book, and is a very good read for someone who needs to get basic introduction and coverage on .Net topics. It covers basic Objects and Classes designs, encapsulation, inheritance, namespaces, webforms and web services. I reckon the price I paid (CAN $37 ) is way too high for this book, but I gave it to some people who needed an introduction for ASP w/.Net and they found it useful. Basically, if you need to do some advanced projects forget this, on the other hand if you need to learn some simple concepts go for it, but wait for the price to drop.



2. If you are not an introductory user then this book is a quick read and overpriced. The subject matter was well selected but the depth of content, writing style, and cookbook mentality was disappointing.



3. This is a good book for programmers wanting to learn about the basics of object oriented programming and its implementation in VB.Net.
   
   Unlike other books that dive into so much technical detail that you end up glossing over the information and not actually learning all that much, this book clearly and simply walks you through the basics of OOPs.
   
   After each section, you are given examples of code to see how the concepts are used. The chapters are short enough to be easily digestable.
   
   I learned more about OOPs from this book than other larger and more expensive titles.



4. I've just purchased a copy of this book and am enjoying reading it. It's written in a very clear and concise manner and a breeze to read. The OOP concepts are clearly explained with accompanying diagrams. Does exactly what it says on the tin.



5. Don't get this book if you have _any_ experience in programming or have little patience for repetition or word count padding. I suffered through the whole thing just so I could feel justified in writing this review.
   
   "HTML elements are not available to the server, because they are text that is passed through to the browser." O.M.G. How did I go all this time without realizing that HTML is text that is "passed through" to the browser?! Sentences like this one are commonplace: "The HTML section of the Toolbox will have a title of HTML." Ya think? Or this jem: "The last category of properties is Misc. This category will list any properties that did not fit into the other categories." The whole book is like this. It's incredible. I didn't pad my jr. high english papers like this.
   
   Finally, there are some mistakes in the references to the samples -- having you name a class something, then referring to that class with a different name later. This type of errata is common in tech books, but with something this short and brutally simple-minded, you would have thought the tech editor would have caught these mistakes. Maybe he fell asleep reading it as many times as I did.

No comments about Learning Visual Basic.NET 2008 (with line-by-line explanation of the source code).

No comments about New Perspectives on HTML and XHTML, Brief (New Perspectives).

2 comments about PHP 5 Unleashed.

1. After reading a PHP5 book in the past I was happy with it. However it was for beginers. I searched for something more advanced. This was it. PHP5 Unleashed goes over several advanced topics. In example there is Regular Expressions (aka. Regex), Advanced MySQL techniches, accessing the OS's programs (Like dd, cp, etc) and more. One thing I should note as that there are some parts that can't be done on Windows. To get the most of this book you need Linux. ( If you want Linux download the ISO image of Fedora Core 4 at fedora.redhat.com. It is great for beginers to Linux. You can also use Mandrakelinux ([...]) but it isn't as simple to use.) Also note that this book has a section for new users but it is small and you should buy a book for beginers first. Might I recommend "PHP5 Fast & Easy Web Development" for novices.
   
   A little disappointment is that this book shows you only how to INSTALL PEAR. It doesn't show you how to use it at all.



2. I have another "unleashed" book and was very happy with it, so immediately picked up this book when needing to work with PHP. What I needed to learn about was session usage.
   
   Unfortunately, this book is not very good for that, for a novice learning to use sessions. The reason why is not because it is too advanced--I'm adept at reading computer textbooks and parsing the info--the problem is that it is a best practice in terms of security to turn register_globals off in PHP, that is the standard config for PHP after 4.1, and yet they provide all of their examples with this being enabled.
   
   They even mention that it isn't best practice, but they go ahead and do it anyway with an occasional caveat here and there for those who are not using it. What that means is that somebody in my position is not only trying to understand the code, but also accound for everything that doesn't apply to me. I have to translate, then interpret. Why should I have to do all that for basic "best practice" functionality?!
   
   I've since picked up other books (PHP 5 recipes, Wicked cool PHP) that are much better. I gave this book the stars it has because it is very informative and useful. In the case of sessions, it is just very confusing.

5 comments about C# and Game Programming: A Beginner's Guide, Second Edition (Book & CD-ROM).

1. Whatever gaming material is encountered in this book is minimal and irrelevant. This book is merely an introduction to C#, plus a superfluous discussion about games. It is my conviction that this book has no redeeming value unless all you want to get out of it is an introduction to C#.

   If you want to write videogames in C#, I strongly recommend Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start : Graphics and Game.

   I hope this helps.




2. I'm amazed at the good reviews for this book. The only reason I can give for that is that perhaps the good reviews are all from the publisher, author and their many aliases.
   
   This book's spelling, grammar, and coding errors make it impossible to use. I'm surprised that the code included on a CD even compiles. I was so frustrated after the first two chapters that I wanted to animate the book, just so I could choke it to death.
   
   Do yourself a favor, if you want to buy this book just slap yourself in the face and save $30.



3. I've gone through half of this book and will not be completing it.
   
   Despite this being a "beginner" book the author quickly overwhelms the user with advanced examples while providing nearly zero explaination of what he is doing or why he is doing it.
   
   Only the simpliest of concepts (data types, casting, etc) are discussed before getting to some of the first extremely long and extremely complex examples.
   
   From the beginning there is no discussion of code and very little in the way of explainatory comments. After 200 pages the author STILL has only mentioned "using" a few times and hasn't even brought up a discussion of namespaces. Yet these items are included in every sample.
   
   Many of the items being used are never explained, there is no step by step process that tells the reader what any particular command does or why he's using it.
   
   My criteria for a "good" book is that by the time the author starts an example he/she should have previously explained what the purpose the example serves. Is this an example that will re-enforce the graphic manipulation discussion of the most recent chapter? Is this an example that will show me in practice the simple coding practices the author explained in the last 100 pages? None of this is there. The author jumps from talking about datatypes to using some advanced C# libraries in a sample without any explaination ever provided.
   
   This book expects you to type in dozens of pages of code (or get it off the included CD) and learn by osmosis the point of the sample; why it works; and what the key elements/procedures are.
   
   Maybe some people can somehow mystically connect to the authors train of thought and understand unexplained code through this method, but I am unfortunate to not be one of them.
   
   If you really want to learn C# and are a true beginner than Petzolds Programming in the Key of C# is probably the best book I've read to this point (I have high hopes for Murach's C# but am just starting that one).
   
   Unfortunately I haven't found any acceptable books that link C# and games programming yet that discuss the subject at a newcomer level.



4. Generally this text is for beginners, so if you are someone who knows nothing about C# or Game Programming, you'll probably be very happy with the book or at least need to study it. Additionally, if you have already studied C# say in school or through other books, but want to learn Game Programming, then you'll probably be very happy with the book or at least need to study it.
   
   If, however, you already know C# and you have a fair knowledge of Game Programming, then you probably won't like the book (seeing it as too simply). Or finally, if you are a total beginner to computers and are not really sure what a complier is, you'll probably find the book hard to follow.



5. Won't waste anymore of my time telling
   you why, you can read other posts!
   
   Don't belive the 4 start rating. I
   doubt this Author has any idea how
   to use C# or any language I would
   imagine!
   
   Not being an author myself I have
   never critized those who are till
   now.
   
   I'll never buy another book by this
   publisher. I would return this one
   except for it being a gift. If your
   in the same position use it to prop
   up your monitor - it's only usefullness~

3 comments about Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Cram101 Textbook Outlines).

1. First of all, I have to say, that I'm writing ONLY about CRAM textbook outlines. Look what the description says:
   
   "Never HIGHLIGHT a Book Again! Virtually all testable terms, concepts, persons, places, and events are included.look no further for study resources or reference material. Cram101 Textbook Outlines gives all of the outlines, highlights, notes, and practice-tests for your textbook.".
   
   So I expected a supplementary material which will help you with understanding the book (definitions, practice tests, examples etc.), but it does not include any such content. The only thing what it includes is about 15 terms for each chapter, like Set is..., Mean is..., Theorem is...,Variable is..., Real Number is... Really primitive definitions of very primitive terms, which understands EVERYBODY. These definitions ARE repeated across many chapters. So for example Mean, Variable or Range definitions are "explained" several times. It is just a term vocabulary, which is often included at the end of books. Nothing about Divide-and-Conquer, nothing about Dynamic programming, no tests. Why does it explain what is an Abstract (let's say abstract of some article) in chapter about greedy techniques? Really useless thing... trust me.



2. I have already written my review(also very negative) and someone has deleted it. How is this possible?;-) So one more time... It is really useless thing. If someone showed me it, I would not even recognize, that it has something to do with algorithm analysis. Expect trivial and childish definitions - what is a prime number, what is a variable, what is a real number... Than you can expect 2 line explanation of some statistical terms like mean, range, standard deviation and also some terms from math (set, union). No mentions about algorithms, about algorithm design, or programming techniques like brute force, divide-and-conquer and the others which are covered in the textbook. REALLY USELESS!



3. I expected a study guide or something like that. It is just a notebook. No more.
   
   A ten dolar notebook. If it were a Moleskine, I'd be happy. But it just a plain notebook.
   
   Don't buy this.

4 comments about Teach Yourself Vbscript in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself).

1. This is a fun book for all who want to learn VBScript. Advanced users may find it elementary, but for people who are just learning how to build websites and want to take their sites to the next level by using ActiveX and Scripting, this is the book for them. It says 21 days...I completed it in 15, and had never programed before. The only downside is that it covers only VBScript 1.0, (it was written when the beta of IE3.0 was first released) and now Microsoft has released VBScript 2.0. It's easy to take the knowledge from this book then move to Microsoft's documentation to learn the new version. Try this book, I really think you'll enjoy it!!



2. "Teach Yourself VBScript in 21 Days" is a killer book. I have never programmed with server-side scripting or client-side scripting of any nature. I had taken VB 4 the previous semester at a local community college. I read this book for an educational institution as core and I never came to class, but I STILL learned VBS just by reading and examples! I highly recommend this book for introductory VB classes as well. Not appropraite for intermediate and advanced VB curricula. In fact, even hating the C interface, this book gave me enough scripting confidence to learn JavaScript and even attempt to taken server-side Perl! Currently I am working on full-blown Java applets, JavaBeans and ActiveX with VB...All this while absolutely HATING C programming. Timothy Koets is also currently my VB 5 professor; this booked prompted my undertaking of the class. I encourage other Scripting Professors and other institutions of higher learning to imlement this book in their curricula. A definite 10 from an experienced HTML programmer!



3. This book does a decent job of describing stuff. On the other hand, this book does not really describe (in detail) the hands on experience you need and does not bode well with real world programming practices.



4. This book is not worth buying or reading for free. I doesn't have complete VBscript content (such as the replace function for strings), and what it does have is very difficult to read and understand. It doesn't do a good job of providing syntax, and that is what we need to quickly look up the usage of a command we already may be aware of. I wish I could return the book, and get my money back.