Customer Reviews

Expert One-on-One Visual Basic 2005 Database Programming

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There are books that show you the new features of database programming with Visual Basic 2005, but it's up to you (your experience or imagination) how to use them in your projects. This book shows you in a great way how to implement the new features in non trivial Windows Forms and ASP.NET 2 projects! It's not a book that you read in just a week; you should really take you time and study it (and also the source code which the author has updated to the final release of VS 2005). Ok. some readers will say that some of the code could be placed in a separate class/tier, but in my eyes that don't affect the learning effect.
At the moment this book is my absolute favourite about database programming with visual basic 2005. If you are also interested in this topic, I can only recommend this book.

I was looking for something that would show me how to do the things I routinely do in Access and VB6. This book is a bit of hit and miss on that score. It has a good discussion of how to avoid concurrency problems, how to setup a Master Details form, and new festures of SQL Server 2005. But a lot of basic topics are missing. For example, what is the best way to update data in an existing row in a table? The lengthy walkthroughs are very detailed but going through them takes a long time and may not provide an answer for the problem the reader is trying to solve. This book only answered half of the problems I asked of it.

I bought this book even though I am a C# coder. Roger has such great concepts on how to do design and coding that I almost shouted for joy after searching and reading other books (e.g S. Malik which is of little or no value). This book goes beyond my production code needs and is invaluable in doing it right the first time. Thanks Roger for the section on concurrency exceptions which we all have in the real world. Most folks sweep this under the rug because it takes a real pro to fully and accurately address it.

I went through the tutorials and after just a day or two felt I was fully up to speed with all the VS2005 features.

I felt the author provided exactly the right amount of information for me, as a 20th year programmer and VB3+ developer.

However as soon as I moved from tutorial stuff back into coding (a full blown niche POS application) I ran into continual crashing of VS2005.

Final recommendation: This is a fantastic book and will be much more useful after several service packs make the VS2005 a usable product.

Having this book a month ago would have saved me at least $1000. Which is about how much I had to pay someone to write code that this book clearly points out was already written and available by Microsoft.

That's the bottom line. This book is a time and money saver for anyone writing VB 2005 code that uses a database.

I snatched this book up as soon as I saw it. I have three other of Roger Jennings' database books and they are great.

This one was a little disappointing. It has good information in it and it is informative. But, percentage-wise at least, it seems to contain a lot more filler, like unneeded code. The style of writing seems so different from his other books that I wonder how much of the actual writing Mr. Jennings did himself.

It's definitely not a bad book. Overall it was worth the money. Maybe the second edition will add more substance. I would actually rate it at 3 1/2 stars, but that's not an available option.

No matter how many .NET and/or "programming database" books you have read (like me), this one is a MUST. It doesn't try to fill hundreds of pages, instead it concentrates on a) best practice tips and b) samples on how to write production-ready ADO.NET 2.0 software. This is stuff other books not even mention!

The book explains the shortcomings of .NET 2.0 and gives you the sourcecode and metrics how to circumvent them. It's then up to you whether or not you implement the necessary features.

The book gives you a much better understanding for .NET 2.0. And even more important, it gives you the facts you need when negotiating deadlines and budgets.

It's full of tips you never learn in university. Especially the chapter "Missing Links of Concurrency Management" is an eye-opener. It makes you refactor your existing code!

Simply a MUST on your bookshelf!

This book does a better job of explaining what happens behind the vs2005 data object wizzards then many of the other books that just show you how to use them.

Wrox books are usually very good, but this one is disappointing. Just reading it would be a waste of time. And as a reference, never once has my question been in the index. Entire chapters of "Best Practices" are Lifted from Microsoft White Papers. After this review, I'm going to order the DB programming book from Theron Willis
and see how that goes.

I bought this book when I was learning Visual Basic .Net and ADO.NET. I needed to do a standard business database application, and I kept going to the book for details on how do do things, and on an overall understanding of ADO.NET. But I rarely got any answers.

There may be some people who find this book helpful, but I am not one of them.