No comments about QBasic Fundamentals and Style with an Introduction to Microsoft Visual Basic, Second Edition.

No comments about The Visual Guide to Visual Basic for Applications: The Pictorial Companion to Customizing Windows Applications/Book and Disk (The Ventana Press Visual Guide Series).

No comments about Visual Basic Power Toolkit: Cutting-Edge Tools and Techniques for Programmers/Book and Cd-Rom.

1 comments about LINQ for VB 2005.

1. Very poorly written book. Difficult to follow and uninformative. Perhaps
   the worse "Computer book I have read" and I started reading them in the 70s'
   Other books on the topic are much more usefull.

1 comments about Advanced .NET Remoting in VB .NET.

1. although the book is ok, it is just another one of these books that has been converted from an origional c # book. This book is also one of those where all's your going to get is a bunch of console examples. I might be biast against this book because I am sick of buying a book on vb.net just to find it was not origionally written for vb.net and there always seems to be confusing code in these books where whomever converted the code to vb forgot a line or 2. When oh when will publishers start writing vb.net books from scratch? Given the amount of these type of books and the over whelming majority of good example online being in c#, I do not see how vb will survive much longer. Anyways if you do not have a problem reading yet another re-write I guess this book is for you.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Word 2000 Automation in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours Series).

1. I buy as many Office/Word/VBA books as I can get my hands on... You never know where you are going to get that little piece of knowledge that will help. Now you know why I bought this book.

   This book was good, but pretty basic. I expected much more out of it. For what it's worth, I bought this around the same time I bought "Learn Word 2000 VBA Document Automation" - which is a GREAT book on Word programming (probably the only book that shows you how to automate documents in several different ways).

   Anyway, if I were starting out, just learning how to write macros, this would be a great book and would've gotten five stars. I think the title and subject matter are a little deceiving though. It is definitely comprised of introductory material. Happy programming.




2. I am a Visual Basic developer and I bought this book to expand into VBA. The book provides a decent amount of explanation of many topics, but does not go into detail about any of them. Also, the code examples are brief at best and did not help me at all. After working on a project referencing this book for a few days, I was not able to get my Word document automated. I got more help from the MSDN and the Object Browser. If you already know VB, don't bother with this book.



3. I have read this book cover to cover (with my highlighter and pencil at the ready) and I've never been more frustrated in all my life. I work with Word everyday and am looking to automate documents and I can make no sense out of any of it. (Of course, there is a strong possibility that I'm stupid and in over my head - but if you think you're going to learn to create templates and fill-in forms and learn to use If-then-else fields, etc., well, I missed it.)



4. The publisher classifies this book as a "beginning level" on the back cover, so it's hard to complain that this is accurate. However, the web support for the book is gone, and downloads that it draws upon are therefore not available anymore.



5. To be fair, it is not a bad book to learn Word/VBA. The user level is correctly marked as "Beginning", so don't ask too much or criticize too harsh. To learn a new skill, one book is not enough. I like a "simple and easy" book like this to gain the fundamental in less than 3 days, then look for an advanced one. Besides, the source code is still on MCP's Web, but in different place (click SAMS on mcp.com, type the key words of the book title in the search box, you should find it). Lot of readers depends on other people's feedback to decide if they should buy a book, so be responsible to your "review". By the way, I am not the author's friend and not affiliated with MCP, SAMS, or Amazon. I am a reader who knows how difficult to find a "right" book, and don't like to see anybody be mislead.

4 comments about COM+ Programming With Visual Basic.

1. After having read and used Scott Hillier's COM+ book for the last year, I've finally found the perfect book to explain the parts Scott skipped. As the preface says, if you are not interested in HOW COM+ works, then get another book. If you are looking for cookie cutter code, get another book. This book explains in good detail how COM+ (and COM and MTS for that matter) works internally. It points out many mistakes VB programmers make in working with COM+, why they are made and how to overcome them. And it is very easy to read, especially if you are moderately familiar with the topics. I just got the book last night and I already love it.

   O'Reilly does it again!




2. There is a big confusion in VB developer community regarding the relationship between COM and COM+. Books like this one have made the situation even worse. Like John Muller's "Visual Basic 6 COM+ Programming Bible", this book failed to address the fundamental COM+ features. COM+ is not just merely a renaming from MTS but rather a complete set of new system services collectively known as Component Services, including enhanced Transaction Services, Compensating Resource Manager, Queued Components, Lousely-Coupled Events, etc. Simply install a regular COM component in a COM+ application won't do anything better than installing it into a MTS package. Authors and/or publishers should be more responsible for the contents of their publications.

   The following are some good VB/COM+ titles that I would recommend:
   1. Scot Hillier's "COM+ Programming with Visual Basic" - this book covers both core COM+ services and high level Windows DNA architecture for developing distributed enterprise applications.
   2. Peishu Li's "Visual Basic and COM+ Programming By Example" -this book is probably the best VB/COM+ programming title available today. It covers all the important COM+ services in the context of VB sample code with detailed explanations. Although marked as for Beginner to Immediate, this book really suites the needs for VB developers of all levels.




3. Jose Mojica sets out at the beginning by saying that this is not a `cookbook', that readers are expected to be familiar with the technology already and that the goal is to look at the architecture behind terms such as COM, COM+, MTS and DCOM; the real goal is to learn exactly how the technology works under the bonnet.

   The book is broadly split into 3 sections: COM, COM+ and .NET. The latter only gets a chapter and is really just an introduction, although a good one at that. The COM section includes 5 chapters looking at interfaces, in- and out-of-process server activation and the infamous COM versioning scheme. COM+ spans 4 chapters and while not all services are described, transactional components and COM+ security are thoroughly covered as well as writing and debugging COM+ components in VB. 

   The author overdoes it by telling us what he is going to tell us, then telling us, and then telling us what he told us. Apart from the repetition though, his writing is fairly easy to follow and it is evident that he has a deep technical understanding of the topics covered.

   Why read this book now that .NET is announced and is on its way? Well, it is probably going to be a couple of years before service pack 1 for the .NET release and until then there is still a lot of COM(+) code to be written. Even so, do we really need to know to such a detail how the technology works behind the scenes in order to use it effectively from within VB? This is not the place to answer that question, but if you think the answer is `yes' and you work with Microsoft technologies, then you will enjoy reading `COM+ Programming with Visual Basic'.




4. If you think that VB is not synonymous with only point and click, drag and drop, then this book is for you. The book covers COM, COM+ and ends with an introduction to VB.NET. Mr Mojica covers the first two topics at a level of detail that is usually skipped (to the reader's detriment) in cookbook-style books.

   Although this book may not be for everyone, some of us are interested in how COM and COM+ work behind the scenes, and want more depth out of a book than one could get by reading the documentation and working the SDK examples. This is that book.

3 comments about Visual Basic 5: The Comprehensive Guide: The Definitive Reference for Windows Programming.

1. This book seems to have every command line's syntax with many usuable examples. Coming to Visual Basic programming from Clipper, I use this book all the time.



2. This book is really good (atleast for me) for programming reference. If maybe you forget something, just look it up in this book. Not a book for newbies to Visual Basic though.



3. This book was the suggested reference in a college-level VB class I took. It is easy to find each command by the index tabs, and the examples are easy to understand. I especially appreciated the "cautions" section included with each command. And best of all, Amazon.com is $10.00 cheaper than the college bookstore!

5 comments about Visual Basic .NET Black Book.

1. If you deduct from this book everything that you can find in the Help files and a whole lot of unecessary code it would number a few hundred pages instead of the massive 1144 pages that it is.
   I am an experienced developer and want something more than a (very good) manual. Perhaps it would suit a beginner better.
   An example of code-bloat was a section on adding a data adapter to a form. The author describes a simple drag-and-drop approach but then proceeds to list the code generated behind the scenes - all 10 pages of it. You can see this for yourself on the screen if you have followed the example, and it is not even accompanied by any explanations.
   Depsite it's size it wasn't always thorough. I wanted to find out what were acceptable values for the DataSource property of a ListBox but the property was not even shown in the list of 'noteworthy public properties' of the object, nor in the index.
   It does however contain a great deal of information on all aspects of VB.NET which makes it useful for a reference book.



2. The book is good for both experienced programmers and beginners. What I was looking well into was the ADO.Net chapters and they are very good.
   I have more than 6 years of Delphi experience and this book was good for me to begin with and as reference.



3. Being a programmer with 3 years experience and developing in VB6.0. I found this book to be a great reference book for me while I began learning VB.NET. I would ask myself while developing.. 'I can develop feature 'x' in VB6.0, so how does VB.NET handle 'x'.. and look it up'

   The Black Book doesn't dive into the philosophies of VB.NET, but rather delivers straight forward code examples of how to do it. For grunt programming and experienced VB6.0 developers, I feel this book is a must on every developers book shelf.




4. This book is a OK book. I would buy "Programming visual basic.net (Core References) by Francesco Balena instead of this book. It fails in alot of areas to explain anything! Hey, I have heard good things in the past about the black book series, but don't waste your money on this one!



5. This book is excellent. One of the best I've seen. Loads of examples, good explanations, far more detail than I've seen other places. Answers nearly all of my questions. I recommend it to anyone!

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