Customer Reviews

Beginning VB 2008 Databases: From Novice to Professional (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It is apparent that the people that wrote "great" reviews on this book must be family or friends. This book is certainly NOT for novices and contains nothing for professionals.

It gives example but no "real world" applications as to the reason for the code that is used as examples.

The author does not include all steps for the user and "assumes" that unmentioned steps would be "known".

Additionally, the listings simply do not compile or work.

I spent more time trying to figure-out why a listing did not work than I spent on the book. I even posted a question to the author three weeks ago and got no response.

I have purchased hundreds of textbooks over my career and I will be demanding a refund for the first time in my 38-year programming career.

SAVE YOUR MONEY !!!!

If you need help in moving your older VB database programing skills into the .NET world this is the book for you. This book will teach you all the basic skills you would expect to know in working with ADO.Net and SQL Server. This book may not be for a very beginning student because it assumes you understand the basics of database programming. This book may not be for the advanced professional because this book is not heavy into theory, just enough theory to get the task done. It is more of a 'how to' book showing how to do basic database programming tasks in the ADO.NET way.

A couple of hundred pages of sloppy, disorganized blobs of code with no clear context, a real mess. Would not dignify this book with any more words.

Not what I expected. I was looking for a book to help me use the features of VB 2008 to create and use databases. While this book is very authorative, it does very little to ade me in my goal. The examples and descriptions are all based on using Console application forms in VB. While this gives you the technical information for manipulating databases, it does nothing to examine and instruct one in benifiting from the "high level" commands and form controls available in VB 2008. The title should just be Beginning Databases: From Novice to Professional, with very little emphasis on VB 2008!

Beginning VB 2008 Databases: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)

I want to state at the outset that 1) I have not yet finished the book, in fact I am only on page 43, and 2) I am an absolute novice in the subject matter.

But I do not want anyone else to make the same mistake I made when I bought this book. I haven't looked at similar books, i.e. about VB.NET and MSSQL, but I've read many books about programming in general and this is the worst by far.

First of all, and this is not really a criticism - just a fact you should be aware of, the book is out of date as it provides instructions for downloading and installing the 2005 level of the MSSQL components and the 2008 level of these components is now available. That may not sound like a big deal, but I thought I could download and install the 2008 products and that the instructions in the book for the 2005 level components would be close enough. Big mistake! Although once I (finally!) got the 2008 level of the MSSQL components installed I've had no problem following the examples.

I am now in Chapter 4, Writing Database Queries, and that's what has prompted me to write this negative review.

The first example is the simple "Select * from Sales.SalesReason". But then the books leaps to an example of Common Table Expressions involving WITH, FROM, GROUP BY, WHERE, and ORDER BY - none of which have been explained at this point. This example, involving those five new constructs, gets only a quarter of a page explanation.

The next example illustrates the use of GROUP BY and involves a WHERE clause: "Where ExpYear in (2008,2009)". But the result shows ExpYear values of only 2008! I ran a version of the example using "Where ExpYear in (2007,2008)" and that produces result rows having both values.

The next example is a variation on the previous example but using the PIVOT operator. These examples are showing the year in which various credit card types in a database expire. The illustrated result shows four credit card types and for each type how many cards will expire in 2008 and how many will expire in 2009. In all four cases the exact same number of credit cards expire in both years! So, e.g., for the "Distinguish" credit card 1215 expire in 2008 and 1215 expire in 2009. When I ran the example my result showed zero cards expiring in 2009 for all four credit card types. Again I tried the example modified so that it used years 2007 and 2008 and got a better result - i.e. a result which provided a better understanding of what the query was doing.

As I said at the outset I am only on page 43, so you can decide how much weight you want to give to this review. But based on my experience of 43 pages I do not recommend this book. In fact I recommend that you do not buy this book.

As a newbie and a novice, I found this one book to be of more value than all the others I purchased for a recent project, because it provided me with the concepts and knowledge I need in order to understand and use the other books. I used this book, more than any other book while creating and finalizing a very successful project. This book provided not only descriptions and examples, but I found the `How it Works' section after each example, also gave me a clear understanding of why the code worked the way it did. It is dog eared, marked up, and worn, because it is the first book I look at when I need to understand a concept. It did not give me all the answers, better yet, it gave me enough knowledge to ask the right questions so I could find the answers!


Beginning VB 2008 Databases: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)

One of my friends is a database programmer and has been after me to learn how to do SQL as well as update my VB to 2008. While I'm quite familiar with VB6, the 2008's methodology had caused me some headaches. Combine that with a lack of experience with SQL and you've got one frustrated programmer.

This book is excellent in that it gives you very direct and easy to follow instructions on how to access the SQL engines without assuming that you are an expert with VB2008. This is the third book I've purchased to learn VB/SQL and it's the first to actually explain WHY things are done and not just throw out the commands and assume you understand how things work. It also has a number of very good examples with explanations for the SQL queries that are being used. While it's not an SQL tutorial, it is quite effective enabling the reader to start working with SQL almost immediately.

If you're not a programmer and don't have experience with VB, I recommend buying the previous books in the series that explain the environment and the quirks of the 2008 implementation for VB. At the same time, if you're new to SQL but are familiar with VB, this is the perfect book to start with. You'll be doing SQL queries in no time and will quickly gain the skills to integrate SQL with your VB environment.

The book is ok as a first step in database programming, you need to cover other areas before you finish from scratching the beginning phase...
I finished it in 10 days and found that it only introduced me to Linq. I should have gotten a more advanced book.

This book was more than I expected. The layout of the book makes it very easy to grasp the concepts the author is presenting. He explains a topic and then there is a simple exercise to reinfoce the concept. It is basic and doesn't go very deeply into the topics, but that's what I liked. I liked having a few hundred page book instead of a 1000 or 1500 page monster. Eventually you may have to get another book that goes into more detail on the topics listed, but for starting out learning about database/application interaction I thought it was a very good book.