Customer Reviews

Advanced Delphi Developer's Guide to ADO

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

In this wonderful work, Alex Fedorov and Natalia Elmanova beginby providing an excellent introduction to Delphi database programmingin general and then go on to expose the specifics of using the variousMicrosoft database technologies, especially ADO. The book is verywell organized and easy to read. In it they have accomplished thedifficult task of presenting an advanced topic in a way that mostDelphi developers can quickly grasp...If you plan to work with ADO inDelphi, this book is essential to your success!

Well, to begin with I'm don't understand why the book got so many bad reviews. While it may not an advanced text, it does cover the Delphi side of ADO very well. I have an almost complete Delphi reference library (haven't added the D6 stuff yet). I can absolutely say that this book covers more ADO than the other books I've bought (D6 Developer's Guide devotes 6 pages to the topic, D4 Unleashed devotes NO pages, and Mastering D5 devotes less than 10 pages).

I don't think the bad reviewers did read the book at all. This book covers Delphi ADO use and not ADO technology basics. If you are looking for an "Inside ADO Nuts-And-Bolts" type of book, buy another book, like the Microsoft Press series since ADO is a Microsoft technology. But if you want to learn how to use the ADO Express component suite for Delphi, then this is the book for you. I've been doing Delphi for 6 years now and I am no novice, and I certainly found the book helpful.

On a side note, I would add that while the grammar in the book may not be perfect (it definitely needed better proofing before press time), the Authors unquestionably know the material. It's worth an A+ in my opinion, and I am thankful to have gotten ahold of solid material for a change. I do find that using Newgroups isn't helpful since the people tend to rant and rave about things completed unrelated to the posted topics. This book delivers focused material, and it has practical examples that you can apply and test right away. A companion CD is included, which I find to be a nice touch.

Great book, great topic, and useful information. The bottom line is try it for yourself. I did.

The reviews on this book are really mixed(up). Some rate the book high and others low. If you are just getting started with ADO, I would recommend this book. If you are looking for an advanced ADO reference book, this isn't it.

I found this book to be very logical and presented the topics very well. Since the authors are from Russia I thought the English would be lacking. However, the book is well written and I found myself not wanting to put the book down. I was learning.

The book does not take you to the expert level. You will need other resources for that.

I highly recommend it to those new to ADO.

Bought this book because of the poor coverage of this crucial subject in my other Delphi books. Wish now that I hadn't bothered. This is a very basic book indeed, and does not touch on the architecture of ADO at all. It is written to get you a quick result, but you will not know how and why ADO works so you can't fix any problems you encounter later.

A book on ADO which does not even have an index entry for "Action Queries" is a complete joke. Save your money

This book isn't really worth the paper its printed on. The code examples are very incomplete, and the book covers the subject matter very poorly in my opinion. I don't know how well Mastering Delphi 5 covers ADO, but Delphi 5 Developers Guide barely mentions it, which is why I purchased this book. The examples in this book are terrible, and it skips over a lot of information that I had to hunt down in newsgroups. All in all, I'm sorry I purchased it, and did better using newsgroups and mailing lists then with this book.

Very disappointed with this book. It's a basic book, not advanced. A high percentage of the text is ADO object definitions - I did not need to pay to read this, I can look at the source on disk. There are many electronic tutorials for ADO available that a competent and experienced developer would get the same benefit from. This is only a nice introduction for beginners (imho).

Based on the title of this Delphi and ADO book: Advanced Delphi Developer's Guide to ADO, I expected "only" coverage of ADOExpress in Delphi. However, that's only a part of this book. The book consists of 23 chapters, starting with the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), OLE DB Providers, ADO and its role in the Delphi Database Architecture. ADOExpress components like TADOCOnnection, TADOCommand, TADODataSet etc. are covered in a lot of detail - as expected. However, apart from these "basics", the book also contains chapters that explain how to actually build ADO Applications, and how to do Business Graphics and Reporting with ADO. Even after those chapter, we're only still halfway the book.
Further topics include OLAP and ADO, ADOX in Delphi, JRO Objects, and a very helpful chapter on deploying ADO applications. Chapter 19 and later introduce Distributed Computing; Windows DNA (Distributed interNet Applications), including RDS and MTS with ADO. There's even a chapter on MIDAS ADO Applications.
There are also a number of appendices; and the most interesting one covers BDE to ADO migration issues!

When I was looking for an ADO book, I almost did not buy this book because of the negative comments that some people had posted (Did they actually read the book?? ). Anyway, I really like it and I think it is a must have in any Delphi developer library.

I found this book disappointing; it lacks essential ADO error handling details. Never having used ADO before, I had to deliver an ADO delphi application in a thight schedule and unfortenately this book didn't help me much.

This book is written very poorly, and leaves out so much information I find myself wondering exactly why it was published. There are much better ADO resources than this book. I have not found anything useful in this book, and think it is way to basic for even a beginner.