Customer Reviews

Hands On Visual InterDev 6

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

 

 

I'm a VB developer and SQL DBA who needed to learn how to develop intranet/internet solutions for central administration of 130+ SQL Servers. Plus, you gotta know this web stuff. I like the concept of 'learning by doing' which is the reason I purchased this book. However, I found numerous errors that made going through this book frustrating at best. With this type of approach, you can't just write it without testing. I have learned to overlook bad grammer, but not bad code. Where do you get your editors?

This book is only a paper version of the online docs.

One particular peeve I have with this book (and the online documentation) is the loose use of the phrase "in script". Too often the reader is left trying to contextually determine if the book is referring to server side VBScript, server side JScript, client side VBScript, or client side JScript.

This is a decent book for anyone who knows very little about interdev. I liked the step-by-step tutorials, but they can get frustrating quickly. It's a good intro book, but halfway through it, you'll be looking for something better.

The Author mentions that she owns the Enterprise Edition of Interdev. This is important because she has installed ALL the options and assumes the reader has done the same. If you are not using the Enterprise edition, have your own web server running on NT, and a ton of other packages, then this book will be fairly maddening.

When I started this book it looked pretty good, but by the middle I found that it was only creating pages that would work on IE and even that was a chore. I need to design pages that fit a wide variety of browsers, and this book does not nearly fit the bill.

I agree with the other reviews. This is a hard copy of online docs and the friendship database you can get off of the microsoft site for free. Invest your money in another book if you already have experience with SQL and Interdev. I give it 3 stars because I think it would be a good book for beginners.

Perhaps it should be re-named Hands on Visual Interdev 6 and get your hands on Visual Studio 6 Enterprise Edition.

I was hoping for a book to introduce me to Visual Interdev 6, and how to connect to Access databases. I found a lot of the content was not on topic at all. How to design a web site, how to use Visual Source Safe, how to manage Corporate development teams etc. etc. This was not why I purchased the book. It would be better if the author had used that space to cover topics not even mentioned in the book at all, like searching for records in a database via a web form.

The very first database chapter presumes the user has SQL Server 6.5, and clearly states you must have this to complete the chapter. You can imagine my disapointment. I don't own SQL Server 6.5 or Visual Source Safe, I am a single designer and don't really care about team development concepts and management. What I care about is developing in Visual Interdev 6. This book was clearly the wrong choice.

Wanting a more robust database-driven website than Frontpage 98 could offer I purchased Interdev 6. I found the program awkward to learn due to the poor documentation provided by Microsoft. There was little to offer in the way of a basic understanding of the tools and their uses. Having a project-oriented book like "Hands On" allowed me to overcome my early frustrations with Interdev and actually produce some real eye-catching results within just a few hours. I'm already up to page 200 and find myself leaving home from work early to pick up where I left off! This is a great book for those brand-new to Interdev 6!

This book should be re-Titled: "How To Use Visual InterDev 6.0 Wizards". And that's it! If you are a developer, this book is absolutely not for you. I will have to return this book and buy another one.