Customer Reviews

Beginning Visual Basic .NET Databases

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

 

 

Background ...

Prior to reading this book I read Beginning Visual Basic.NET, Professional VB.NET, Visual Basic and the .NET Platform, Programming VB.NET, and Moving to VB.NET.

If you are considering the Wrox series of VB.NET and ADO.NET books, I recommend reading the books in this order: Beginning Visual Basic .NET, Visual Basic .NET Databases, Professional VB.NET, and Professional ADO.NET.

Review ...

This is one of the best written programming books I've read. The authors did a great job in organizing the concepts and sample VB projects so that they built upon one another in a logical manner. The book focused on how to apply concepts rather than rehashing MSDN online documentation. I liked the approach of "here's a concept", "let's write some code", and "here's how the code worked". The diagrams were very effective in showing visually how things work.

The authors have a good understanding of the types of problems developers run into when storing and retrieving data for their first windows forms or web forms applications. They are also very effective writers.

Since this book has 3 authors, it would be interesting to know who wrote what parts. Some parts are very good, with understandable examples and clear explanations. Other parts I just scratched my head and wondered.

It's not that I didn't understand what they were doing, it's that I wondered why they were doing it. It seems they went out of their way to make parts of the code complex and confusing.

The main program developed in the book, the Product Management System, took 4 chapters. It could have been a great example of a simple program that taught the main points of database programming.

However, parts of the code was poorly designed and written, resulting in the program being overly complex and not functioning like a professional program should.

I feel that if you are teaching someone, you should show them the right way to do it. As a beginner in VB I am looking at the whole picture. Just because this book is about database programming, the authors should not ignore the quality of the rest of the language in their example code. Is it too much to ask the professional programmers who write books to write professional quality programs?

I currently don't have a better book to recommend. I've started reading another book I got from the library, but I don't have an opinion yet. To bad the library doesn't have more books on VB so I could try before I buy.

Visual Basic.NET Databases is a good book for learning how to use DOT with database for example SQL Server which this book is focused on. It also contains a good description on ADO NET. But its not a book for pure beginners, its best to have some knowledge of of VB6 with some objects before buying this book. This is new technology and Wrox done a good job and it's worth 3 stars.

The Authors are excellent writers and I like their approach to the material. It is very structured, logical and effective presentation. I also like this book because it didn't contain a lot of the useless filler Wrox books tend to have. As for linking to MS Access I think they provided sufficient explanation for us to know how to modify a connection string and use MS Access instead of MSDE. I was able to do both. Also, I was confused sometimes were code segments came from, but thats happened only when I tried to skim. If you read code snippets in context you know exactly where code should go.

This is a great book, but it is definitely helpful if you already have some VB.NET knowledge as suggested by the publisher prior to starting this book. I did not, and so some of the examples were hard for me to follow (no fault of the authors). I like the hands-on examples in this book. They are basic but relevant to the real-world. I got a lot out of this book despite my inexperience with VB.NET. It gives you a broad intro to several facets of .NET including web services which look very interesting! I think my experience with the book would have been excellent if I would have been more prepared. I have now back-tracked to fill in some of the basic knowledge I needed. I now believe I could forge ahead with some basic database projects in VB.NET using this book as a reference. I would certainly buy it again and I'm sure I'll use it as a reference for some time to come. Get some basic VB.NET knowledge and then buy this book for learning the database specifics.

The book is generally good for a beginning book. The problem is that you can no longer get the Sample Code as the publisher WROK has been sold and is no longer keeping the old sample code on their site.

For people with some experienced on VB .Net, this book will serve as a very good introduction on the basic skills on database programming. Not only have the authors done a good job on showing how to use ADO .Net, but they have also done a very nice job of showing how to apply the skills of objected-oriented programming techinques. Base forms are developed and then inherited to develop more sophisticated windows forms.I strongly think that this book is worth reading.

This was one of the first books that I read about .Net that used the IDE for the examples.

I saw the book. It was good for exprienced vb 6 and who has some info about vb.net .the auther go through the book with small example and try to use ado.net to do what he want at this application . the application contains 2 forms one for products and the other for customer ( as i remember)and he make search form.The book concentrates on vb for database application point of view . But he don't care of some issue related to database applications and i thing this code is COMPLEX and u must be very concentrated to understand it. For example, he make stored procedure to update record of database .This i greet as he learned us how to use stored procedure with ado.net but he must begin with a simple Example . Any way I recommend u to buy this book if u didn't find any book who concenterate on database programming with vb.net. Note i only read the first 9 chapter and i thing that is engouh to say if the book i well or not and at ch. 10 he start talking about asp.net and i think this waste the size of the book . he can remove this chapter and add more exmples for windows forms and ado.net

This book had a lack of examples.
Poor presentation.
The little snippets of code it used to navigate through
the book were very dificult to grasp since there are no
example to demonstrate that they work.
I have been thru just under a dozen .net books. This is
one of the worst alongside ithe vb.net unleashed book.
It was very easy to give up reading this book since you always
wonder if the code you type is ever going to work or
is that the reason why some of the the code was not downloadable