2 comments about Oracle and Visual Basic Developer's Handbook.

1. This book should be renamed "Oracle Objects for OLE (OO4O) Developer's Handbook". It details the latest and greatest features of OO4O, including support for Oracle REF's, LOB's, and AQ. However, coverage of ADO/OLE DB is very weak, with only 7% of the book (the final chapter out of 14) dealing with Oracle's OLE DB Provider and ADO. It also lacks specifics (features and limitations) on Oracle's ODBC drivers, and practically there is no mention in the book of Microsoft's ODBC and OLE DB products. Microsoft MTS is only briefly mentioned in the OLE DB Provider chapter, but no detail is given on how to set up the database and web server to use MTS.

   If you want to get the hard-to-find information on connection to Oracle from ASP pages, you will be disappointed again. Although there are 2 chapters on connection pooling and transactional control, they focus on the OO4O implementation. You will not find info on the best practice for achieving scalability using ODBC/OLE DB connection pooling, or how to deal with the pros/cons of storing ADO connection/recordset objects in session/application variables, etc.

   The level of this book is at the beginner level, although the back-cover has it as intermmediate/advanced. A major portion of the book is spent repeatedly explaining what each line of code does, even though it is obvious towards the later chapters of the book. There are other types of inefficient use of pages such as instructions how to place a visual control on a VB form, i.e., details for how to use the VB IDE. People reading this book should be assumed to have basic knowledge of VB, even though they may come from a PL/SQL background.

   To repeat, if you code OO4O, this is the best book on the market (there are only 3 other VB/Oracle books available, if I may add). If you do ADO/OLE DB/ODBC, this book is not going to help a bit. The OLE DB chapter I mentioned earlier is almost a rehash of the User's Guide that comes with the OLE DB Provider. For developers in the ADO/OLE DB camp, I recommend the 2 books from Wrox Press (Professional ADO 2.5 RDS Programming with ASP 3.0 and VB Oracle 8 Programmer's Reference).




2. The book should have been titled "OO4O Programming with VB" and that'd merit 4.5 stars!The authors (all being Oracle Tech and Support Analyst) do a very good job of describing the workings of OO4O. While a section is dedicated to ADO, ODBC, and OLE DB, this book is primarily for OO4O users-to-be. Since I was looking to use ADO and OLE-DB, I found this book interesting but useless (only 1 example). What tickled my fancy (and I am still reading it!) is the book "Visual Basic for Oracle 8" by Dov Trietsch (Wrox) which does an unbiased treatment.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Internet Programming with Visual Basic in 21 Days.

1. Arrgh! When is an ethical author going to actually describe the very significant new Web-related features of VB6 rather than doing a sloppy and minimal update of VB5 info? This book and Carl Franklin's effort are absolute ripoffs that do not deserve to be rewarded with your money! Instead, save it and reward the author(s) who will hopefully provide the first real publication that deals with DHTML, WebClasses, and the other pieces that distinguish VB6 from it's past versions. Please!!



2. Check out Wayne S. Freeze's hands on SQL Server 7 with VB6 book. It covers pretty well on ASP, WebClasses, and DHTML, Pluse excellent example of how to get SQL Server and VB together



3. The book provided the answers both as a tutorial and a reference book to get me up and on the right track with web classes, ASP etc. It gives everything it says it will give and is easy to read considering the ground its covering.



4. This book talks lots of basic content about internet ! If you want to write internet applications , you should learn the use of DHTML and ASP, which I think is the most important. However, this book focuses on the use of DHTML within Visual Basic 6. I think it's better to reference other books containing the use of WebClass within VB6 after you read this book.



5. This book covers a wide range of topics but the author never explains his code. The book shows you how to wite a search engine program, the program is several pages long. But the author never explains his logic or how the program works.

5 comments about Visually Learn Visual Basic . NET in 12 Hours.

1. I have been working my way through the lessons and have been pleased by the content. As a beginner this has been a good way for me to get a good foundation. I think this is a good place for a beginner in vb.net to start that has some background in programming and visual basic. I like this product better than sitting through a lecture because you can rewind it when you find yourself not paying attention. I do hope the presenter produces more advanced vb.net dvd sets in the future.

   Nevertheless, I can't give the product a 5 start rating. There are problems with the dvd set. The dvd is broken into small bites of information, but the music they play between the sections is too loud. Second, the sound is too low when the presenter speaks. Third, I checked all three dvds and could not find all of the code presented in the dvds. Fourth, some topics didn't go far enough. I am a beginner vb.net so it wasn't always obvious why you would want to do something. Fifth, on the second dvd the video and sound get out of sync in the last lesson.

   The main problem with the dvd set is that it is like most code. The dvds have some bugs that need to be worked out. However, the bugs are nothing that can't be overcome. I would recommend this for a vb.net beginner who wants to get a good foundation and can force themselves to sit down and actually go through the material.




2. I waited for this with exitement, but was disapointed when I opened the package and played the DVD.

   The voices was low, just like the teacher was talking into a bucket (think they compressed it too much) a metallic sound. Between the teaching it was an "music" that was just like an alarm bell, that was really hight volume. May the purpose of this is to wake up the student??

   This made it really hard to follow the classes for an foreigner. But it was ok when you saw it a couple of times and understood what he was saying.

   Cheap, but not really good




3. Think of this as a City College-level class, but subtract all ability to communicate back to the instructor for any clarification. I'm not knocking City College - I've taken many courses at them so I know of what I speak - but a formal university education it is not. The same applies to this DVD set; you will learn the subject matter but other education sources yield a higher-quality outcome.

   As many others have noted, the sound quality is horrid. Compare it to making an internet phone call using nothing but a cheap mic attached to your web-cam; sounds like he is talking into a soup can. You're also hit with annoying transition slides - loud & weirdly timed slides - where after jolted by the volume shift, you sit and look at them for what seems like forever. Too bad the same length isn't applied to the informational slides; those are usually presented without enough time to read half of it. I spent a lot of time on the pause button, greatly extending the "1 hour" lesson window.

   The instructor also presents in a way that makes you wonder if he rehearsed at all before creating the Final Take. He also makes a few verbal "typos" which can make you need to rewind to figure out what he actually meant. The labs could have been better structured; you are referred to the slides (included PDF Files) for complete instructions, but the slides present minimal information and are in a quasi step-by-step rather than a goal oriented format; many times you have to look at the solution just to figure out what the problem was. And lastly, the source code, although on the DVD, is not clearly organized and the instructor never clearly tells you where to go to load whichever demo solution he is working with.

   There is little doubt the instructor knows the language and the environment. And you will take away a decent beginner's grasp of VB.NET programming. But is this presentation better than a book of the same goal? When you take away the common content elements from a DVD- and a book- presentation, the DVD set begins to lose ground in that a book is easier to reread confusing sections than the DVD is to replay, and when all is said and done, the DVD doesn't provide you with a reference guide at your finger-tips to utilize. The DVD approach is a good idea, and worth the view, but go into it knowing this might not be your last learning purchase.




4. I make a mistake buying this DVD. First the sound and video quality is very poor, second the teaching method, confusing arguments and statements make me stop before finish the course. I'm very disappointed.



5. I was looking for some videos to supplement a class that I was taking in VB.Net. I tried to like this video, but I couldn't. In this series, Rick Dobson lectures from his desk. His voice is so low that you have to turn the volume way up to hear him. But then, BAM!!! You are hit with extremely loud music every few minutes! The sound mixing for this DVD set is the worst that I ever experienced.
   I could only tolerate about an hour of this torture before I finally gave up on it.

5 comments about DAO Object Model: The Definitive Guide.

1. This book covered the most I've seen on DAO. It does not cover ADO at all, but mentions that another book covering ADO is in the works. The book is really a reference book, listing out each and every command. It works best as a lookup for specific commands. If you need to learn DAO get another book, but once your into it and get into trouble, this book might just help.



2. O'Reilly needs to have a color of book for those books which fit between Nutshell books, and what I like to call the "learning books" (ie. "Access Database programming and design"). This book would be one of those books.

   I don't think I could learn DAO from this book. I first realized DAO's potential from reading Steven Roman's Access Database Design & Programming. However, if you realize the capabilities of DAO and are ready to move on to the next level, then this is the book that you need. While the nutshell books are good "ticklers" (you just need to know the syntax), they don't go into a whole lot of depth. This is the book you need when you are thinking "there IS a way to program this, but what is it?". After you have mastered DAO, and just need a "tickler", then you can graduate to DAO in a Nutshell... whenever that comes out.

   I have used this book many times when I knew that DAO could do the job, but, I needed a little bit more background info than just the syntax.




3. To say that this book is useful is an understatement. It combines in one compact volume a complete and understandable reference to DAO which now never leaves my side (even a bedside read!). Most of the references are punctuated with code samples written in such a neat way that it makes my own coding look cumbersome and tortuous. The book is worth buying for the code examples alone. Helen's book is enabling me to write succinct, direct code and to expand my knowledge and use of the DAO object



4. We are certainly at a point where Microsoft would prefer for people to believe the DAO is in fact DOA (dead on arrival). While it is naive to believe every marketing nugget that comes out of Microsoft, a reference book on DAO at this point seems a little late, doesn't it? Sort of like if O'Reilly put out an OS/2 reference book tomorrow.

   Once you get past the skepticism about the timing, the book itself has some issues. I perused it at the bookstore using my "10 minute rule" (browse the book for ten minutes, refuse to buy it if you find ten mistakes in that time). I will not give the exact count of mistakes I found, but I'll go so far as to say that it failed the test, and failed worse than any book in recent memory. I won't get into specifics since I am not Ms. Feddema's technical editor, but I'll tell you that if you decide to purchase the book, make sure you skip anything related to replication or security. Online help for DAO is far from perfect, but in this case help has fewer mistakes!

   Moving past what is there that is wrong, there is much that is not covered that one would expect in anything titled a "definitive guide" such as this. None of the sort-of hidden methods that have been documented in places like the Jet Engine programmer's Guide and elsewhere (PrivDBEngine, ISAMStats, etc.) are even mentioned. It does not talk about any high end issues such as thread safety. It does not really discuss security in any usable way (and security is the one thing you will need DAO for if you still use it since ADO/ADOx don't do the job right now!). Transaction processing is not discussed in depth. VBScript is "covered" but since VBScript's best host is ASP, where DAO is not safe to use since it is not thread safe, this discussion is incomplete to say the least (I assume this discussion comes from Ms. Feddema's Outlook experience, but in general ADO is definitely the preferred VBScript data access method). My favorite Jet topic (replication) is "covered" but in an incorrect manner that will keep it from being useful.

   The book ends up being a mediocre reiteration of basic DAO knowledge, and that is something that is in my opinion at least 30 months too late.




5. This book does not serve its purpose as a definitive reference. I was able to read it cover to cover in an hour or so while sitting in an airport and found nothing remarkable - the striking part is that the book dismisses objects, methods and properties which the author does not understand or have experience with. REFRESH, for example (which is treated dismissively in the book) must be used in order to refresh a changed collection in a multi-user environment or update a collection in a rapidly changing single-user environment, or the field that you expected to be gone will still appear; or the table that you just built using DAO won't be in the collection.

   I was disappointed that Oreilly allowed such a book to be published. I had concerns about the author's technical ability before the book was published. Oreilly should have had these same reservations.

5 comments about Visual Basic Oracle 8 Programmer's Reference.

1. This book is a easy introduction to practically all basic concepts and technologies involved in Visual Basic programming for Oracle 8 back end. Among many other things it covers ADO, OO4O, PL/SQL. Contains many useful tables. It could be very useful as a startup manual for Visual Basic programmers who are new to the Oracle world. However, if you are experienced in Oracle, VB and PL/SQL, look elsewhere. Even for inexperienced programmers this book could become worthless after a week. For thorough Oracle presentation I would recommend the following books: ISBN: 007212606X ISBN: 1565923359



2. An OK reference, but could use some reorganizing. The author chooses to cover OO4O in earlier chapters before covering ADO, which makes it difficult to follow the examples if you're only interested in ADO. I find myself constantly having to flip back to the OO4O chapters (which most people probably skip) to figure out what the author is trying to explain in the ADO sections. The PL/SQL sections are good, especially if you're a beginner.



3. This is quite possibly the most poorly written book I've ever purchased. This guy writes at a third grade level....absolutely painful to read. I went through the first two chapters and simply couldn't take anymore. How any of the previous reviewers could have possibly rated this book at more than two starts is beyond me. I highly recommend going to a local bookstore before ordering this book from Amazon and actually skimming through parts of the book.



4. If your like me, the main reason I bought this book was to use ADO to retrieve Oracle data from within my VB application. I go to that section of the book (chapter 13)and instead of solutions I find all sorts of excuses why Orcale and VB dont work together!!! His excuses include "Oracle and ADO have not been the best of partners" and after showing a code example he states "remember, you'll have to wait for ADO 2.5 before you can run this". I bought the book to get a project done now, I dont need an author telling me that "here's how its done but its not going to work until a new version of the software is released!!!!"



5. I just skimmed this book at a book store. It did not impress me. With most of the VB programmers using ADO, the author could have devouted less pages to OO40 and concentrated on the nitty gritty of ADO and VB. If you can read MSDN and browse the NET, you don't need the book. Especially if you have even an average understanding of programming front ends and back ends.

No comments about Visual Basic 4: Performance Tuning and Optimization.

1 comments about 7 Client/Server Applications in Visual Basic (Toolbox of Templates Series).

1. The best book out in the market for AS400 programmers trying to figure out how to connect to the AS400 from their PC. I like all of the different ways explained in the book.

5 comments about .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000 (Kaleidoscope).

1. The book is very much a hand's-on architect's/programmer's book. Not much emphasis on an academic viewpoint, but more the practical lessons from someone that has learnt from 10 or more years of design/programming. It contains many little insights that come from experience.
   
   It is (thankfully) not another beginner's book. It is set at the enterprise level.

   Good detail on testing and debugging. Throughout there is reference to scalability, fault tolerance and performance. I liked the way he introduced the test bed and using the same debugging approach across different layers.

   He is quite bold in suggesting the how things will go in the future (best architecture/design approach), offering various options, but admits some may be wrong.

   I would like to have seen more test results, I know these will be available with the non-beta code, but to compare methods, it is useful to see comparative details in the book.

   It is a good overview of the possible current architectural solutions. He realises there are many solutions to a problem, like life, the answer is a matter of balance and compromise.

   Good size book. Easy to read, so it must have been well written!




2. This is a good book. It is definitely more of a design book than a programming book (as the title says). A good developer has books like this in his or her library though.

   Unfortunately, Jimmy's writing is very hard to follow at times. English may be his second language, and it shows. Next time get a better editor -- a very poor job of editing the book was done. Some sentences just run on forever and use a bunch of unneccesary words. This may sound picky, but this type of book is read through entirely and it should be better written and organized.

   I do really like how Jimmy expores different design possibilites. He gives the pros and cons of each option, including the one he proposes. He obviously understands the technologies very well and has much real-world experience. You can tell he is an experienced developer.

   So remember, this is an enterprise design book. If you follow his proposal you will have an application with many layers/tiers that also makes use of COM+ / component services. For smaller applications this type of design is usually overkill. But for very large applications a good design is critical.

   Good book.




3. Some good material in this book that are related to N-tier design, but not a .Net book at all. Less than %20 of the book had anything to do with .Net. It looks like the book was written 2 years ago and then .Net was added to the title to better market the book. I had to return mine.



4. If you are looking for a book that gives you a blueprint for building a scalable enterprise database application using the .NET framework and SQL Server 2000 then this book hands it to you on a plate.

   Don't buy this book if you are looking to learn Visual Basic .NET or SQL Server because this one is all about applying those basic skills taught in other books to produce a "real" application.

   Most books on this subject fit the 80:20 rule, they take you 80% of the way and then ask you to just finish things off yourself. Anyone who is familiar with the 80:20 rule knows that the remaining 20% needed for completion is as much effort again as the first 80%.

   This one introduces, designs and builds a real application to completion, consisting of n-Tier architecture with full transaction control, business rules and data access with concurrency control. It doesn't ignore real world requirements such as performance, debugging and testing.

   The author imparts tips and tricks learned over the years and gives you a working example of one of the most important design patterns in database access, "Batch Command" (sometimes referred to as "Unit of Work"). This pattern minimises multiple trips to the database by compiling separate SQL statements into a single script that is send and executed in a single call. All code examples are in VB.NET and are accompanied by UML diagrams where appropriate.

   In summary this book fits hand in hand with Microsoft's .NET data access strategy and basically hands you the design, implementation notes and source code of a working, scalable, enterprise class application on a plate.
   
   Well worth it!




5. This book should have been entitled "Design of Enterprise Systems with emphasis on Stored Procedures". It really has little to do with VisualBasic or .NET, and more to do with proper large application design in the OO/SQL era.

   The author is obviously obsessed with Stored Procedures and makes a very good case for using them. In his systems, every application deals only with stored procedures and never performs SQL statements directly. Well, that's one way of doing it, but it introduces a whole lot of problems that were never really discussed too clearly.

   The book is an excellent resource not just for the theory but for practical code snippets you can [take] and use in your next huge, huge enterprise application.

   I say "huge, huge", because the sheer amount of overhead you will create in developing any applications based on this architecture is astounding. For anyone who started programming in COBOL, welcome to the world of Microsoft object-oriented programming! You will be spending 90% of your time worrying about coding things that have absolutely nothing to do with the application! Do we really want our application subject matter experts to have to worry about Shared Properties Managers, Object Construction, Threads, Object Pooling? Well, we have no choice if we go with .NET under Microsoft.
   
   If you've stepped away from VisualBasic for a couple of years, welcome back to the new world of Microsoft's vision for a single language with many names. They call it VisualBasic now, but it's just C wearing a mask. Forget about rapid coding. Forget about type-independence. Forget about functions and subroutines. You're going to be spending most of your time memorizing the wall chart of COM objects and trying to learn yet another incarnation of VB that is as incompatible with the previous version as Java is with Fortran.

   Don't believe me? OK, use Visual Studio.NET to write a simple application that looks up a record in a table and says "Hello World".

   But I digress. The book's treatment of error handling, trace logging, concurrency locking, and other oft-neglected issues is very good and gives practical advice on how to do it. I will personally implement many of his suggestions. Many others I will pare down into a more manageable architecture for a company that does not have a multi-million dollar IPO worth of cash to burn through in the next 12 months.

   His critical analysis at the end of each chapter of the proposal presented in that chapter, on the basis of performance, scalability, portability, maintainability, reusability, testability, debuggability, interoperability, and other "ities" was very clever. I will use that, as well as "codability", "readability", "longevity", and "learning curve" to help evaluate what language I want to use in my next application. It might show an MS OO language to be the worst choice. Who knows?

   2 pet peeves:

   1. "Preventive" is the correct word. There is no such thing as "Preventative", because we do not preventate things. Wonder how that slipped past the spell checker that SURELY every writer nowadays has.

   2. "Errand" is running to the store to get something. "Errant" is something that has gone wrong. The entire sample application is built on a misuse of the word "Errand". But I forgive Jimmy because he is Swedish, and if I had to write a technical book in any of my 2nd languages, I would be hard pressed to get absolutely everything right.

   Good job, Jimmy.

1 comments about .NET Framework Programmer's Reference.

1. Unfortunately, this book isn't near as good as Dan's previous VB6 Reference. A truly useful .NET framework reference can't be squeezed into 400 pages, that's a fatal flaw. A reference book DOES NOT have to mean small, it has to mean easy to find information. This book should have had more example code, yes, which would have added more pages, perhaps 100 or so. SO WHAT! Again, reference means easy to find, not concise to the point of barely helpful. On the other hand, the book does discuss a few topics well, so I gave it three stars.

5 comments about Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic .NET in 24 Hours.

1. This is a pleasant book (but now the wrong edition) for the beginner with no prior VB experience. Teaching is done via many VERY SIMPLE projects, and these cannot be done without Visual Studio. You want to buy the latest version "Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 (VB .NET) in 24 Hours Complete Starter Kit" which includes a DVD with a trial version of the latest Visual Studio.

   Projects are all for Windows Forms projects including one session on automating Excel (from a Windows form). Visual Basic.NET's most exciting use for many is for the code behind ASP.NET Web Forms when developing applications with a web browser user interface. The author does mention such use very briefly but offers no examples. There are many fine introductory books at this same beginner level on VB.NET and ASP.NET; so if web applications are where you are headed, this book will not be the best choice.

   This book might be nice easy step up for someone moving from the Excel macro (VB for Applications, VBA) world into more general applications. If you are a professional but new to VB, the book can be completed in a week end; and you can then pass it on to a kid just getting into programming. As noted by another reader, the description of the language is too brief to give this book value as a reference.

   Author James Foxall has many books to his credit and writes nicely. For the most part he eschews the silliness of many professionals writing "down" for beginners. There are a surprising number of editing mistakes, but nearly all of the code runs as presented.




2. Those looking to start programming in VB will find this book very useful. The chapters are arranged in a logical manner so that the user will build upon knowledge from previous chapters. The author explains things in easy to understand terms, anyone could learn to start using VB with this book.



3. This book (unlike many others on the same subject) does NOT assume any previous knowledge of Visual Basic and helps the reader on the journey to learning vb.net with ease.It is well written in easy to understand terms and has me wanting to move on to the next stage already.The many examples in this book also provide a very good reference library for future use.



4. I hadn't programmed in years so I bought four books in an attempt to get a handle on VB.net. Of the four, this is the book I used to learn the basics. Lessons are easy to follow and understand. Sample programs are simple but I am already using knowledge from them to write my own code. Highly recommend.



5. This book is great. The author has a way of explaining VB in a very understanding way. I got this book for under $3.00 new! It was the best $3.00 I spent this year!