Customer Reviews

Distributed COM Application Development Using Visual Basic 6.0 and MTS

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is absolutely amazing. It provides a great deal of insight on properly building distributed applications. It deals with 2-tier and 3-tier development; giving you pointers on what and what-not to do.

The best part of this book is that there is very little space-filler text or what I would call 'fluff'. Jim gets right to the point and conveys his information without excessive use of word sentences. The wording is very direct and to the point. Great focus!

Get this book if you want to understand and learn DCOM programming using VB6.0

I personally love Chapter 11 DCOM: Step by Step.

A quick look at the Table of Contents of this book will show you that this book spends lots of time discussing things other than DCOM. If you take out the chapters on Windows Interfaces, ADO, WinSock, the Mom & Pop video store DOM (if you read the book you'll know what I'm talking about), creating ActiveX controls, ASP, IIS applications, ActiveX documents, and the chapter on Microsoft FTP & Web Browser controls there isn't all that much in this book. Obviously, you can skip these chapters but just be aware there is lots of padding in this book to try to make it 680 pages. It's not so much that these chapters exist, but that the chapters on DCOM are all pretty much introductory and never really attack the difficult issues. This book would be better if it dealt more in depth with design issues of creating object models that can best exploit the benefits of a COM/DCOM architecture.

Obviously, I felt somewhat cheated by this book because now I feel like I need to go buy another book to learn the tough stuff. On the positive side, this book is easy to read and has clear code examples that make it easy to learn THE BASICS of whatever topic the author is teaching. The best/most helpful chapters in this book were on "Creating ActiveX Controls" and "Implementing an Object Model". Notice, that second chapter is only about "implementing" not designing.

If you know a moderate amount about COM & MTS and aren't interested in the fluff chapters, this book can be summarized in a sentence, "DCOM is just COM, distributed." Instead of using the following line of code: set myObject = CreateObject("SomeComponent.SomeClass") you use: set myObject = CreateObject("SomeComponent.SomeClass", "MyServerName") where MyServerName is the name of the server that the DCOM object is registered on. If you store the server name in the registry then you can use a variable for your server name and your COM object can now be run using DCOM.

This is a great book, mostly due to the amount of code examples that it has. With most of the advanced Visual Basic books that I've used, I often have to go look up additional information in help, only to find he exact same information there, too. The silly "hello, world" demos included with these books are not real-world enough for me and still leave me wondering how to apply the concepts to my application. I've never seen any of the demos from this book anywhere else, and they are mostly all excellent. This book has its share of "hello, world" demos too, but they are balanced by some of the best real-world examples I've seen in any other book on programming. It's obvious that the author has actually done this type of programming in real life. I can honestly say that I know exactly how I'll implement my distributed application now that I have this book.

I was expecting lots of discussion on MTS and DCOM which are the the areas an intermediate VB programmer lacks necessary knowledge. But MTS and DCOM were discussed each in one relatively short chapter. A great majority of the book deals with stuffs that an intermediate VB programmer should have already know about, such as classes, UI design, creation of objects, etc. Also, many pages appear to be a "programmer's reference" in using the example application, explaining quite in detail the usage and purposes of the sample objects as if you have purchased a new software that you will be using in real life (much like when you purchase an ocx with user's manual). Well, if you are planning to setup a video store, this will be a great help.

When I started to read the book, I literally can quickly browse the pages that in one night, I reached chapter 11 (DCOM step by step) which is one of the areas I am interested in. While I browsed quickly, I noticed an error in page 41 concerning the CreateObject. If you bought the book, go to this page and go down at the bottom and I'm sure you can figure out yourself what this error is. There can be several errors in the whole book if I just read slowly.

However, if you came from VB3 or you are new in object oriented features of VB, this book is a helpful starter. Many VB programmers still codes the VB3 way (e.g., using public variables for passing data between objects and modules) and this book will be a good inspiration on why you should start to change the way you code.

As for the included CD, I have not opened it because I am planning to return the book, unless I found a co-worker who is willing to pay half the price for this book.

This is a great book for all VB Distributed App developers. Its clearly written, easily understandable and gets straight to the point.

Also the examples are nice and clear - not 100 lines of sample code to demonstrate a simple point, unlike Microsoft help files.

Whilst there is a wealth of beginner books there are very few good books beyond this level - but this is one of them.

If you have a year of more VB experience and you develop distributed apps then buy this book.

This book just scratch's the surface of MTS programming with Visual Basic. The book does not explain in depth-design concept when designing MTS solutions. If you never have programmed in MTS this book is a good beginners book that explain the rules to use when creating N-their application.

The CD-ROM that comes with the book has several useful demonstration programs. Plus, there is a fully implemented distributed application that shows examples of handling various scenarios with MTS. This guy is not afraid of bringing up a real-world situation and showing the code to handle it. Great job, great book!

These guys know there stuff! As a consultant at Microsoft and head of the Windows Developer User Group, I am frequently asked to recommend learning sources, including books and instructor-led training. For distributed COM using VB, this is the answer. The book is based on a course the author wrote for and teaches at UCI Corporation (one of our premier partners - look them up [online]), and thus is also an excellent self-study guide.

Congratulations to Jim, UCI, and Prentice Hall!

The book is well written and reads easily however the lab is one long program on a video store. I have found that books with these examples tend to get bogged down. Using "one long program" instead of different examples with each chapter, makes it difficult for the reader to skip a chapter because you have to pick up the program where the skipped chapter ended. If you are one who likes the one lab/program, then I think you will like this book better than I did. Otherwise try the Wrox series.

This book is a breath of fresh air, not only because it's chock full of real-world examples, but because it's written clearly, concisely and doesn't take up 3 feet of bookshelf space. Perhaps more importantly, it also manages to explain the kind of subject matter that is usually reserved for experienced programmers, but in a way that a novice will embrace and understand.

It covers all the major topics that VB programmers encounter, with useful examples (not just theoretical applications of the information), and without waffle or padding. It's so hard to find a book that cuts out all the junk and gets straight to the point, but Mr. Maloney has done it. I think this book is absolutely priceless.