ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition) [Paperback]

William R. Vaughn (Author), Bill Vaughn (Author)

Book Description

Series: .Net Developer | Publication Date: February 2002

ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers, Second Edition brings the popular first edition up to date with fresh insights and tips on COM-based ADOand adds a voluminous section on the new ADO.NET technology. Written specifically for COM-based ADO developers retooling for ADO.NET, this is a developer's book, packed with practical advice on how to make code run faster, yet be easier to write and understand.

Veteran author William Vaughn guides you through the data access maze with working examples and numerous discussions of what works and what doesn't. Derived from years of experience working with data access developers, Vaughn's Best Practices are a set of techniques proven to drastically reduce overhead, problems, and confusion—for the developer, the system, and the entire team. While some are quite simple to implement, others require considerable knowledge and forethought to enable.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William (Bill) Vaughn is an industry-recognized author, mentor and subject-matter expert. He's been in the computer industry for over 30 years—he's worked with mainframe, minicomputer, and personal computer systems as a developer, manager, trainer, marketer, support person, and writer. After 14 years at Microsoft, Bill stepped away to work on his books and training seminars. His area of specialization is focused on data access and especially Visual Basic and SQL Server. He's written six editions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server (Microsoft Press) and two editions of ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for Visual Basic Programmers (Apress). There's even a C# version: ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers (Apress). Bill is a top-rated speaker and frequents conferences all over the world, including VSLive, Developer Connections, and PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server). He's also written a wealth of articles for magazines such as SQL Server Magazine, Visual Basic Programmer's Journal, .NET Magazine, and many others. Bill is working on content focusing on the .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server CE, as well as the next version of SQL Server. He's available for consulting or custom training.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2nd edition (February 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893115682
• ISBN-13: 978-1893115682
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,814,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Vaughn (1947-) was born to a military family and spent the first forty years of his life moving from base-to-base and city-to-city. He learned German in Wiesbaden, Spanish in El Paso and Thai in Bangkok. After travelling the world on business trips and speaking tours, he finally settled in Redmond, Washington in 1986. More recently, Bill has turned his talents to fantasy fiction. "The Owl Wrangler" is his newest creation. An early manuscript was characterized as "...another Watership Down" by his college writing professor. He enjoys writing, photography and sharing his experiences with anyone who'll listen. Bill is the father of two wonderful daughters and has two granddaughters who gave him inspiration for more than one of his books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but lacking important info, July 30, 2003

By 

Al Aska (Juno) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition) (Paperback)

First off, the first half of this book talks about working with ADO in VB6, scared me at first but the second half talks about ADO for VB .NET. So, right off the bat 1/2 of this book is most likely useless to you depending on what you use or want. Goes into great detail about gotcha's, speed, interesting methods like using stored procedures and how the dataset is handled and what to watch out for. My problems, he does not mention how to bind a control through code. For example, have a form that has a grid/listbox and when the user clicks on an element have it display more detailed info about that record in labels & textboxes which are bound to the record... won't find it here and that's like basic 101 stuff. Maybe you want a parent child record, with the parent in text boxes and labels, and the child to be a grid (sort of like the tutorial but a little more advanced since it too does not show textboxes/labels). No help here. Also, all his examples appear to be just single-form based. I wanted to know more about how to program connecting to a database across multiple forms. Why, I even wanted to create a single connection object and use it across multiple forms... or have a database application on multiple forms... another basic database example. No help found in the book, after 18 hours I finally crawled my way and found how to do it myself and how darn simple! But, if you don't know where to begin (this book was no help) it's difficult and tedious. Now that I know I'm kicking myself.

In the end this book fulfilled me half way. I wanted to know how to program an application across multiple forms that connect to a database, how best to use the same connection object across those forms, and how to bind textboxes/labels through code and how to update, delete, and insert records that way. This book has left me in near utter darkness on how to do that. I wanted to know about parent/child relations and this book had very little to offer as far as I'm concerned in respect to examples (there's one). However I have a complete understanding of how to connect to a datasource, access columns, set up parameters, access stored procedures, and some knowledge of parent/child relations, some gotcha's of using the fill method, how to set filters, and sorts on the returned recordsets, and a good understanding of updating/deleting/inserting and how to intervene with those operations... also foreign constraints so that's why I give it an average rating.

21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great ADO book, so-so on ADO.Net, February 12, 2002

By 

AZWolf "AZWolf7" (Chandler, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition) (Paperback)

As a purchaser of all of Bill Vaughn's Hitchhiker series books, this book was a bit of a disappointment. If you're looking for an ADO book, you can't go wrong. If you're looking for an ADO.Net book, keep looking. More than half the book covers ADO, which is surprising since the title leads with ADO.Net. I had purchased this book because previous BV books were extraordinarily helpful in learning database technologies, and I like his writing style and the callout tips. With ADO.Net, I was hoping for the detail found in previous books, and it's just not there (although I haven't finished the book yet).

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for VB progammers moving to .NET, December 24, 2002

By 

Norman Gootee (PETTIGREW, AR USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition) (Paperback)

I did not read the first half of the book, which covers ADO, but the second half, on ADO.NET is great! The style is easy to follow, the examples make sense and there are almost zero proofreading errors (which makes the book a standout among programming books by itself). The code examples in the text, are minimal, but the CD has the complete code and more. The examples on the CD work (another standout feature). This book is not for a beginning programmer, but it very good for an experienced progammer trying to make the move to ADO>NET, it was the 6th book that I read on the subject and after reading it, I was able to go back to my other books and understand things that had not made sense the first time I read them.