Customer Reviews

Ado Examples and Best Practices

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I started reading Bill Vaughn when he privately published his "Hitchiker's Guide to VB" a long time ago and have not been disapointed with his work - ever. (The Hitchiker's Guide is still available from Microsoft Press.)

This book is just as good as his great Hitchiker book and so is a must purchase for the experienced user of ADO. Note if you are new to ADO I wouldn't recommend this book as your first book! Instead I recommend two other books: Jeff McManus's "Database Development with VB" from Sams and Macdonald's "Serious ADO" from Apress the same people who published Vaughn's book.

When my development team went whole-heartedly into ADO in a middle tier, we did so, at first, without the help of this book. As you know if you've looked around, there's not much out there. We survived. Then we found this book. So good every member of the team got a copy. This is a must read for anyone doing heavy ADO coding. It talks about _how_ ado works... so you can understand the ramifications of design decisions and work to design software that performs with ADO and utilizes its features to the fullest. If you can only have one ADO book (in addition to the help files), this is the book. If you're looking for an ADO tutorial, this really isn't it. If you're doing it and need advice and want to do it better, this IS it.

Yours,

-jbn

If you're looking for an ADO Reference, buy a different book. If you develop and maintain VB Database Applications w/ SQL Server back-ends, do yourself a favor and GET THIS BOOK!!

Does your clients applications run fine on one computer, and behave weird on another all of a sudden? Read this book to confirm what you have been thinking and learn proven ways to get around the "side-effects" (Bugs!) in ADO, and the 'migration' issues between ADO 2.0, 2.1, 2.1 (GA), and 2.5.

It's a pleasure to read a book written by someone who has obviously been in the ADO trenches. Vaughn does not pull his punches, so you will get the straight scoop on how ADO really behaves - not how it's supposed to behave as with the typical ADO Reference Book.

Enjoy!! -Rob

If you use ADO, you need this book. Much like Bill Vaughn's early "HitchHiker's Guide to SQL Server" this book tells you everything Microsoft forgot to warn you about in ADO. Filled with tips, tricks and gotcha's, this book could save you countless hours of debugging, and endless frustration. It has for me. Plus, Bill Vaughn is an amusing author, who makes what could be a very dry and boring subject actually entertaining.

After several frustrating hours with the David Sceppa (Microsoft) and WROX Press ADO books, I finally found in Bill Vaughn's work exactly what I'd been looking for: a list of best practices for working with ADO in a client-server environment. Excellently written, great examples, and just as compulsive as me!

If you have already been working with ADO for some time and you want to learn advanced tips and tricks, this is the book for you. Written in a light and entertaining style this book will advance your understanding of ADO to an expert level.

This is a good book for advanced users of ADO, however if you just started using ADO and want a good background and solid knowledge base of the subject this is not the book to get. The book has most of its examples in VB. I was looking for some ASP examples and it definetly lacks good ASP support. I would suggest getting WROX's ADO 2.5 book if you're starting out using ADO.

This the best book I've found on ADO. It is well written and beatifully organised. The key chapters for me were 4. Getting Connected 5. ADO Command Strategies 6. Recordset Strategies 7. Manipulating Your Recordset. There is also a great chapter on ASP as well as a chapter on moving data efficiently between tiers which are not my main focus. I didn't give it 5 stars because already it's a little dated. Nothing really on ADO 2.6 or SQL Server 2000. But it sholdn't be a handicap.

Also not much on esoteric command strategies such as creating Stored procedures on the fly where your parameter is in the Select or From clause.

This book covers programming with ADO thoroughly and well. Vaughn does not only take you thru the best practices but also thru the questionable ones. You will learn why a best practice is a best practice. You will also learn the proper syntax to use in commands as well as the purpose of many of the options that are w/in a command. (The options we see in the VB IDE but never know how to use.) I found the book extremely readable and obviously extremely valuable. If you plan on using ADO you should have this book, it really should be part of the VB programmers canon. The one negative on the book is that while it references ADO 2.6 alot it does not really get into it. There also is not very much XML support. i am sure future versions will correct these mistakes.

This book is targetted towards intermediate and advanced users. Hence save your humor about your daughters in some other books. His previous book on VB 5: Hitchhiker's guide to VB was excellent. This one is written for clowns.
What I mean is: when I buy this kind of book which is targetted towards advanced users, I just need the technics so I can implement them quickly. So save the jokes for some other books. My suggestion is to buy Serious ADO: Universal Data Access with Visual Basic by MacDonald. If you only have a couple of weeks to implement some app using VB and ADO, this book will deliver.
I got my app running with solid foundations in no time.
When reading books for ADO, you need to understand connection objects, disconnected recordset, parameter objects etc. Serious ADO illustrates them rigorously - minus the jokes.