5 comments about Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (Programmer to Programmer).

1. The target audience for this book is someone with some VB/VBA/VBScript experience who is looking to expand into serious VB development, and has possihly been put off by more advanced and detail oriented books. The writing style is casual but not cute. Concepts are presented first from a big picture view followed by more detailed explanations and code. A single main project is woven through the book with numerous additional short examples for introduction of new topics. Examples are kept to just the point being explained and contain numerous screen shots. The introduction to COM is outstanding and of correct depth for the intended audience. Although there were 3 principal writers, the book speaks with one voice and one writing style. It is, I believe, an outstanding choice to follow completion of a book like Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6.

   Bruce Kirkpatrick MCDBA, MCSD, MCSE+I, MCT, i-Net+, Network+, A+




2. Before buying this book I was curious how the enterprise level VB developement has been done. Though I am a developer, I did not have enterprise level experience. I was searching for a book which gives a real world development. It's a great book !!. It jumps into the subject with real world example, Banking Application. This is the pattern required by the people who're waiting for a enterprise level experience. I can recommend it without haveing any doubt. Go ahead and buy it, you never regret it. my congratulations to all authors to this book.

   Thusith Kathaluwage AACS,MCSE,NCC




3. I'm a huge fan of the book that WROX has put out over the years (the 2 Beginning VB 6 books are phenominal). They've taught me virtually everything I know about programming. However, I must say that this book falls far short of my expectations for this publisher. It started out great; the examples of using RUP and UML were very helpful. I also learned a lot about MTS, XML, etc. that I did not know before. However, when it got to to actually writing the application, I had to take charge. Repetitive logic, misaligned object architechture, and not enough descriptions made me so frustrated that I only finished the book so I could rewrite the application more efficiently. Now, I'm a far cry from a professional programmer, so maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. But, when I read a book to lean a new technology or method, I don't expect to be saying things like "Why did they do it this way?" or "It'd be much more clear if they did it this way." These, among other things, were said while reading every page in the sections dealing with writing the app. All in all it was very disappointing, but I won't hold it against these guys; they're still my favorite.



4. In my opinion, this is how every book that attempts to teach computer programming should be written. Most books on programming tend to teach bits and pieces that leave the reader hanging in mid-air. You learn the "alphabets" and the "parts of speech" of a programming language, but you are not taught how to put it all together into a beautiful prose, right?
   Not this book. "Beginning VB 6 AppDev" takes you, as it were, by the hands, and leads you through the tunnels, the caverns and other subtleties of application development. What you have at the end is a superb application, and a well enlightened reader. It is very rare to find a book this good: a single book that covers virtually everything needed to develop a fully, functional scalable application. Yes, it covers the whole development life cycle of a multitiered application.
   The authors did a very good job. I gave it five stars because it is worth five stars. If you are not convinved, get a copy, and study it.



5. The first third of the book deals with subjects covered in other WROX publications. The treatment here is cursory, but enough to be usefull. However, once the code is covered things get messy. Properties are all named with Get (not good practice) and several properties should be coded as methods, for which the authors seem to have little use. ADO should get more attention, but the authors just go ahead and hard code database connections. The same parameters are sometimes treated as variants, then strings or integers. The stored procedures for the T-SQL database were all named with an sp_ prefix (which is a no-no), and so on... On the whole it's a usefull book, once you clean up the authors' mess.

3 comments about Microsoft WSH and VBScript Programming for the Absolute Beginner.

1. This book was a very easy read. I am a complete beginner when it comes to WSH and VBScripting. I found this book to be a great primer. The only questions the book left me with were the actual syntax of methods, properties, and built in functions. These are important areas, but I feel the book left me with a good overall understanding of the 2 topics. I am not sure I could write my own worth while script yet, but I could definitely read and understand a script already created. Only took 2 days of reading to complete this book and my interest was kept the whole time.



2. This book is an absolute must for the beginning VBScript programmer. Not only does Ford provide step-by-step direction to scripting, gradually ramping the complexity of the exercises, but he leaves the reader with WORKING scripts in the form of games with foundational concepts applicable to real-world scripting development.

   My primary objective was to learn VBScripting basics to support script enhancements for Mercury Interactive's QuickTest Pro tool (that is based in VBScript), and this book well served its purpose.

   I highly recommend it to other readers.




3. I reallly enjoyed this book. It was a great reference for a beginner such as myself. It was easy to read and very easy to understand. I definitely recommend this book to anybody wanting to learn how to script. I would have it given it five stars but there were a few spelling and graphical errors in it. Other than that, a great book for beginners.

No comments about Fundamentals of N-Tier Architecture.

5 comments about VB.net Developer's Guide (With CD-ROM).

1. This book, although it doesn't include enough code, is the best VB .NET book I've come across so far. Well written, easy to understand, and concise. Enough said.



2. Ok, it's a nice book. But it lacks in code examples, (i.e., lots of methods and properties, but not codes). It really shows you the new features of the .Net Framework, but sometimes the book is boring... Instead of teaching you what things are used for, it just shows you other informations, in a deep manner, but not the code by itself.
   Anyways, it's on my reference library, but if you want to learn .Net by other ways, like practicing with codes, I suggest you to look for other books.



3. Unless they have come out with a new edition that throws out 80% of the original edition, this book is so badly written and has so many egregious errors that it might take you weeks to unlearn all the wrong stuff it teaches you.

   It was written by many authors, and it shows. A few parts have good content and actually teach worthwhile stuff. But for the most part the chapters either (a) just echo the online documentaion, telling you that you can change the font by applying the font property [doh!], (b) attempt to explain a complex topic in a dozen paragraphs, and so you learn nothing useful, or (c) are just plain flat wrong.

   I don't have time to go into all the errors I found. The book is so bad that I couldn't even consider donating it to any charitable drive. It's now being used for starting fires in our fireplace. Come to think of it, that might be the best use for it.




4. I would not give this book 1 (one) star as Bill/Beverly did but I understand their frustration. I woudl give it 2.5 stars but they don't allow for 1/2 stars. I agree more with J Michalany this book lacks content.

   My view is the authors were too stingy with the explanations and comments. The book would have been much better if the explanations following the sample code truly explained the sample code. Or if the sample code had sufficient comments.

   The authors spent 20 page on programming fundamentals. This could have been covered in one chart/table (i.e. List the programming function and tell us how it has changed in .Net). I wish they had spent those pages on some of the newer concepts. For instance the GET and Return and how that effects the processing in the properties.

   The authors also introduce new items and then they fail to explain them. They also do not inform you that they will be explained later (i.e. the Imports keyword) in the book. This leaves you scratching you head trying to understand an under commented abbreviated slip of code.

   However they have the most comprehensive index I have ever seen in a textbook. More textbooks should take note of this.




5. I'm new to VB, whereas this book intends to explain VB.NET to developers who were familiar with earlier versions of VB. Even though that probably retards my learning, I'm still convinced this book fails. Imagine, nothing but brief code fragments, and no hands-on exercizes, until page 219?? Actually, there are no hands-on exercises even at that point, just source code for some apps on a small CD.

   Every chapter is skimpy, every chapter leaves something out. This book is too clumsy to help beginners and too incomplete to help competent developers.

   I learned some VB.NET, and I'm continuing to learn it, but not with this book - with the MSDN documentation on the web. That's not how it should be when you buy a book.

No comments about Using Vbscript (Using ... (Que)).

5 comments about DirectX 8 and Visual Basic Development (.Net).

1. This book is fantastic. It's only draw back is that it should have included a CD. I'm not going to fault the author for that, since most publishers don't include them any more. I did find the source code at Sams very well documented and full of good examples. I'm glad someone finally wrote a book on DirectX/VB programming. The title here at Amazon is wrong, but it does include some VB .NET example code.



2. Why is it that developers who copy and paste from MSDN think they're suddenly authors? I see pages after pages of tables with method names and short descriptions that don't contribute to anyone's understanding, but only to fill in the, what else, pages. For example, the 3 chapters on DShow spand 37 pages and they're full of enumerations of interfaces and their methods and oh, here's a bonus, two pages of instructions on how to create a Standard EXE project that references the ActiveMovie control type library.

   If you're looking for a meaningful guide to how DirectX works, this one will disappoint you, but if you're an actuary, it might be mildly familiar.




3. I agree with Paul asarak's comment. This book has a lot of pasted stuff from MSDN and from DX SDK help files, it has no cd, you need to download the examples from sams' website and there are some examples you need to type in the computer in order to test them.

   This book is as if you were ready a tale, tells how everything is supposed to work, but SURPRISE!: the color and gamma controls from DD are not supported by all video cards, but the book doesn't tell you that.

   It has a poor explanation in issues like the parameters that the calls to DX take in the example code. Since it has the same tables of methods and other stuff taken from MSDN, if the explanation of the MSDN didn't clear your doubts the tables in this book won't. I don't know about the others, but I feel a lack of explanation in DD.

   If you've already fought your way through the maze that the many DirectX parameters are, it's behavior and have learned the basis of it, you may feel a little dissapointed. Anyway you must take in account that sometmes you may want to have another source of information when trying to understand DX, besides the MSDN and the internet.




4. This is by far the worst purchase I have ever made. It goes to show that you shouldn't buy a book based on a table of contents alone. The author's code is weak at best. He explains 1/4 of the primitive code he writes and then throws in variables with no acknowledgement. In his discussion of directPlay he fails to mention the need to implement any interfaces. I've been teaching the database side of app developement for years, and if I can read a book and still be no better for it, it stinks.



5. Keith Sink, DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development (Sams, 2002)

   It's 2003, now, and the world is slowly migrating to Microsoft's .NET standard (well, those who aren't using Linux, anyway). Here's a prediction, built on past observation of the process: companies who have been developing apps in Visual Basic for years will get copies of VB.NET, expecting a no-brainer transition from one to the other. Their programmers will import the programs, and immediately die of massive aneurysms at seeing the number of errors (especially the number of seemingly unfixable errors, if you happen to be programming in DirectX or any other API where classes expose other modules, which is verboten in .NET's "managed code" environment). This will leave the companies stranded and unwilling to move to .NET. They will be stuck behind those companies whose programmers have read DirectX8 and Visual Basic Development.

   Keith Sink's book was written at the perfect time, and he often goes step by step through processes both writing code for VB6 and for VB.NET, making the book an invaluable resource for .NET VB programmers who are converting VB6 programs (or who are programming in an area where there are far more VB6 books than .NET books, which is, well, just about every area you can think of). Even if you're not planning on using DirectX, seeing the way things transition from one language to the other in one aspect of the language should give you a clue on how to make the transitions in other areas.

   Sink doesn't mention at any point that there's actually a Microsoft.DirectX library in .NET. But then, neither does Microsoft's documentation. Nor does its upgrade wizard. (I only found about it after asking a random question on a message board.) So it's hard to fault Sink for something that, at the time he was writing, may have not been in the framework, or may have been considered an unsolvable problem. That aside, Sink's book is, for the reasons mentioned above, the best I've read to date about Visual Basic .NET at all. For such a specialized book to be so generally useful puts it in a class by itself. ****

4 comments about Visual Basic .NET Code Security Handbook.

1. So you're wading into the .net world and there's talk of code access security? Where do you start?
   With an entire chapter devoted to 'How to write insecure code' followed by a chapter devoted to 'How to write secure code', Lippert's book shows us the common mistakes (even if we have the right intentions) that can leave our .Net code vunerable to attack and he shows ways to secure it.

   Even more is offered up for digestion in the chapter called 'Spot the Security Bug' - or perhaps it could be entitled 'have you understood all that you've read so far?'
   This book definitely opened my eyes to security risks that I've never even contemplated... And if you want to star in the next movie on cryptography, that's dealt with as well - though I didn't read that chapter myself.

   So is this book worth it? Will it help you to start using the code security features of .Net?
   Yes. It definitely gets you started and you'll be able to do some basic but very powerful security quickly with a bit of practice. And thanks to all the tips on bad techniques, you'll avoid making mistakes that could leave your apps exposed.

   Does it leave you wanting more? Yes. But in all fairness it is a 'Handbook'. I would also say that experienced developers would get more from this book than rookies like myself. I expect as my experience developes, I'll be going back to this book more and more. What would I add? .Net comes with a variety of utilities. Some of these are briefly covered. There are tools to secure and view assembly permissions - I'd got more if this book combined the code security aspect with the use of these utilities and walked me through some real world examples - CASPOOL.exe and PERMVIEW.exe are not covered in any great detail - but would augment the subject matter nicely if they were. For those new to the .Net world (aren't we all? but I mean really new), I think atleast one chapter that details a simple app would be nice - it could cover everything from
   1) XP/NT security settings and perhaps show how to do a few basic things here
   2) The stuff that this book already does well - code security

   3) Using various utilities that come with visual studio .net to view permissions, set permissions on assemblies

   4) and for good measure, give us some tips on how to test some of this security - how do you test something you're preventing from happening so you know it works? (some details are offered in the book on this and I found them useful)

   But again, in fairness to the author, that's more a 500 pager type of book and this is a handbook. If Code Security is mysterious to you or you know just enough to want more details, this book is a great start.




2. Should be required reading for all .NET developers, both C# and VB.NET. Chapters 5 & 6 are strong, with some good lessons on leveraging the .NET security framework and overall secure coding techniques.



3. Like many books I found the advice to be at times obvious. The book is well-organized and probably achieves its goal, but if you're already a competent programmer, it might not add much to your knowledge pool.



4. I found this to be one of the better Wrox books I have read in quite some time. Many of the topics discussed in this book should be common knowledge in the .NET world, but I can guarantee they are not. In fact, I cently was involved in a panel discussion at a popular developer conference, and then the panelists asked the audience who used code access security, not a single hand was raised.

   This book covers many .Net security topics very well. It is intended as a handbook, and its size keeps the focus somewhat narrow. For this reason, every serious developer should have more security literature than just this book. On the other hand, if every developer just set aside the few hours it takes to read this book, then we would have much more secure software.

   Bottom line: Great book that does exactly what it set out to do. However, reading additional security books such as Writing Solid Code as well as other .NET specific security books is highly recommended.

1 comments about Microsoft Visual Basic BASICS (Basics).

1. This book is the main reason of why I became a computer science engineer, and genius in my field. I totally respect the authors

4 comments about Visual Basic Programming for the Absolute Beginner w/CD (For the Absolute Beginner (Series).).

1. I've had the book for a couple of months, but I've only recently been able to wrestle it away from my 15-year old son. This is a great way to learn Visual Basic. Finally, a teaching tool that takes advantage of how fun programming really can be. I can't wait to check out other books in the series. They're already on my kid's Christmas list.



2. I do not think this book is for the "absolute beginner". It has been frustrating trying to build the programs in the book, because, even in the first chapter, the author does not explain how to do things, he just says "do it". I am sorry I bought the book. I am now using "Visual Basic 6 Complete", which I find much better for a beginner like myself.



3. ...I liked its approach of using games and "fun" lessons for teaching Visual Basic. I've already completed SAMS "Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 24 Hours" so I'm not the "Absolute Beginner" that is the target audience of this book. With that in mind:

   1) This book is NOT for the absolute beginner. There is little if any discussion on how to use Visual Basic/Studio at all. No handholding at all. Often, items are mentioned only in passing (like how to do comments in your code) with little explanation. It seems an effort was made to make the book less intimidating by keeping it under 350 pages. The net result is a book with far too little explanation and information.

   2) Throughout the book, when it comes time to add controls to your programs, you're simply given a chart listing all the controls and *some* of the properties you have to set. So what's the problem? The chart doesn't list any of the size or placement properties for the control! So you constantly have to flip back to the screenshot of the program - usually several pages earlier - to give yourself some idea where the item is supposed to go and how big it's supposed to be. In another example, in the animation program from chapter 3, you're supposed to assign a picture to 9 image controls. Problem? You're never told the NAMES of the picture files to assign! The author simply says that the images can be found on the CD with the book. Only they're not there! They're included as one large bitmap file on the CD which won't work for the program being worked on!

   3) Code errors - in chapter 3, the author twice makes mention of using a particular Boolean variable in his program, making sure to allocate it by using "Dim". The problem? It's never used! All he does is allocate it, it never gets put to use!

   4) Also in chapter 3, the author mentions the "Keydown event, which you've already seen earlier". I couldn't remember seeing it earlier, so I looked in the index. Turns out that "Keydown" is discussed only once in the book - IN THE SENTENCE THAT SAYS IT WAS DISCUSSED EARLIER.

   That said, there are some good things to be gained from this book, as the author uses some events and controls that other beginning books don't touch as relate to games, so that's good. But if you're a true beginner, forget it.




4. Allow me to begin by stating that while I am an experienced Basic programer, I am a beginner to Visual Basic.NET. This is the background from which I write this review. My understanding of Basic programing in general gives me some advantages which someone totally NEW to programing will not share.

   The trouble with many books on Visual Basic is that they focus so strongly on fundamentals that you never get to the fun stuff until very late.

   For example, I bought a different book; 'Visual Basic.NET How to Program', by Deitel as my introduction to VB.NET. (Please note: If you have NO experience in Basic, the Deitel book is not for you.) The book is wonderful. It goes into great detail on the topics and is information-dense. But it is a dry read doesn't get to the FUN stuff, like timers and simple graphics until late in the book. After pouring over that book for the better part of a week, I was ready for a break. I wanted to do some FUN stuff!!

   Browsing over the selection at the book store I finally settled on 'Visual Basic .NET Programming for the absolute beginner'. This book has many strong points and a few flaws. The flaws have been spelled out by other reviewers, so let me focus on some of the things I really liked.

   First, if you read many VB book reviews you will see that a common complaint is that a book was written using a beta version of Basic .NET and that the examples do not work, or do not work well with the final release. This book does not seem to suffer from that flaw. That is GOOD!!

   Second, the author has a great writing style which is a refreshing break from the rather dry text of my main instructional book. The author gives some excellent explanations on important core concepts, such as classes, inheritance and OOP. I found the second perspective on these topics very helpful to my understanding of them.

   Third, the author does some Fun Stuff. You will learn, through the example of an arcade game how to use a timer to control events in a program. This knowledge will give you the keys for implementing your own ideas, be it writing a savings calculator which actively shows your hypothetical savings as they grow month after month and year after year, or writing your own graphing-programs which plot in real time.

   The author also covers sequential and random access files, which are an important function for many programs.

   My main lament is that the book does not cover page flipping, sprites, collision detection and buffered screens. For any book supposedly focusing on game programing, this is a serious lapse to my way of thinking.

   Still, the author probably left those topics out because the book was supposed to be aimed at beginners, but this is no book for beginners! You are going to need some VB experience if you hope to get any real benefit from this book, so the absence of those fundamental programming topics is keenly felt.

   That having been said, I am not being fair in faulting this book for failing to be what it was never intended to be so my complaint is neither relevant nor valid.

   The intent of the book was a good one; to be a fun introduction to Basic .Net for the absolute beginner. But the authors good intentions may have been sunk by an aggressive editor and/or other publishing constraints (price or page count). That is too bad. This could have been a 5 star beginners book (or a 10 star gamers book!)

   Conclusion: Here is a good complimentary book to your main VB.NET studies, but definitely not a stand alone text. If you are on a budget and totally new to Visual Basic. NET, this is not the book for you. If you have some Visual Basic experience and are looking for some fun and another perspective on key topics, you could do worse than to buy `Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programming for the absolute beginner'.

No comments about Microsoft Access 2002 with Visual Basic for Applications Step by Step.