Customer Reviews

Dan Appleman's Developing COM/ActiveX Components With Visual Basic 6

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I believe Dan says it best..."understanding how something works can help you understand how to use it." I agree 100% Dan. This book is well balanced. It throughly explains, not only how to create ActiveX/COM Components, but the benefits and pitfalls of the different types of components. The examples in the book are great, unless your looking for an example to solve your problem. That's why I like this book. Dan is not trying to give examples to solve your problems. He is giving you examples so you can apply what you learn from his book to your problem. A way better method of teaching someone a new technology.

If you want to just get code to type in your application buy a different book. If you want to be able to apply this technology to your applications, buy this book today.

Dan's book is definitely an authoritative work on the subject of COM/ActiveX development using Visual Basic. Even though the book is geared toward professional VB programmers, the material presented provides a well-rounded view of COM/ActiveX for most developers, providing them with the knowledge required to build professional, quality components.

While this book could be read by VB programmers at any level, the book does move a bit faster than most, suggesting that the reader should be familiar with some of the concepts beforehand in order to fully appreciate what Dan is writing about. This is not a limitation in any way. It was refreshing to read a book that got to the core issues quickly.

I appreciate the fact that Dan did not put much code into the printed material. He included only what was necessary to make his point. This left more room for detailed coverage of the relevant issues. Many times, books will be inundated with hard-to-follow code instead of relevant discussion of the information. This book was packed full of information.

I recommend Dan's book to others because I know it covers topics that are essential to VB programmers. COM/ActiveX issues will only become more important as Visual Basic continues to evolve into an Object-Oriented development tool.

There is a lot of useful information in this book, but if you're looking to glean the essence of COM and ActiveX, and quickly learn how to code ActiveX components, this is not the book for you. If you're interested in the nitty gritty details underlying this technology, you'll find it here.

This book is not filled with how-to's and endless code listings but it tries to give you true understanding of com. I used it in conjunction with the mastering series of MS and it worked quite well. Some parts of the book were really complex and I had to read them twice or more to understand them. It assumes you have quite some knowledge of VB.

Dan Appleman is my VB idol. He got a little full of himself in this book yet he kept his world-known teaching technique as excellent as ever. This book features TONS of material for pure reading, more than the kind of material that makes you sit next to your computer with the book on your lap and your hands on the keyboard. It explains every little detail in the technology called Com/ActiveX, even things you didn't really wanted or cared about knowing. Not all of what he wrote about is important, but most is very useful. A great book for the eager to learn. I, for one, loved it.

About a year ago, I wrote a review about this book. Everyone was saying that this was a great book, so when I gave this book only 1 star, I took alot of heat from people who think that "Dan's the Man!!". I decided to review this book again. This is my second review and my result is still the same. Dan may be the guru of Visual Basic but he cannot communicate those thoughts into written words. Don't get me wrong, Dan knows how to talk and this book is full of talk, but talk is not teaching nor will talk help you master the advanced subjects such as COM. In this book, Dan starts to tell you about subject, then he goes off on a tangent. Sooner or later, he might return to the subject. The cartoons in the book have a striking resemblance to "Bevis and Butthead". That is a scary thought! Bevis and Butthead becoming software developers and then writing a book about it. The cheap sales pitches for software that his company sells should have been put into an appendix. This book is a very large book (800+ pages) but if you cut out the cartoons and all of the talk, this book would be 1/2 of it's size. I recommend Peter Vogel's book "Visual Basic Object and Component Handbook" instead. Dan is a very smart man but that does not mean he is a great author.

I had to respond having read the off base previous review. This is one of the best technical books I have ever read and the source code is printed out entirely. Appleman goes beyond boring details and shows you with simple examples the inner workings of VB. Actually, I have been converted to respecting VB now that I understand how OBject Oriented it truly can be. He has very few personal judgements and if he does, he backs up his arguments with logical bench marks that can really open your eyes to performance tuning. I recommend it as an ESSENTIAL book to anyone who will be writing code in VB, regardless of the level.

Easily one of the best books in the field I have ever had the pleasure to read. I am currently recommending this book as the standard reading for all VB developers in my workplace. The style makes the book easy to read and the content and examples are first class. I cannot recommend too highly this excellent book

Yes, Appleman, you are smart and know the innards of vb like no one else. But a true manual makes complicated things easier to understand. In some cases, like the section on collections, this is achieved. Other chapters are so boring and buried in trivia that my head began to hurt, then I realized...I can close the book! I have a large library of vb books, and virtually never get the answers I need from this one.

The book covers ActiveX/COM but in a very wordy fashion. Pages and pages of irrelevant text make finding the core issues difficult. Some of the topic examples are reasonably useful, others are extremely trite. Surely Appleman can come up with better scenarios than rabbits in hutches.

I bought this book to help take me beyond what is available in the Microsoft VB documentation, but it does not do so in any useful way. Having already splashed out the money on the book, I would prefer if advertising was kept in one section, rather than having it throughout the book (loads of code segments, no matter how trivial, are prefaced with a Desaware copyright notice, and we are continually told of their software products).

This book has lots of body but not enough meat.