Customer Reviews

Internationalization with Visual Basic with CDROM (Sams White Book Series)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I have been developing with Basic since VB 3.0 was released. One complaint I always had was that it simply did not support anything international. Sure, they added a few functions with each release and StrConv could do some nice tricks, but you were on your own if you wanted to do anything complicated. MSDN would include lots of documentation that was great for C++ developers, but if you used VB, you had to suffer.

Now, Michael has produced a text that has the same power as Nadine Kano's book on International C++ development, only in VB. It discusses all the concepts you need to understand. in plain english. Then it takes you through important international issues:

*Formats for numbers, dates, and currency values
*Calendars
*Fonts on VB forms
*Calling Unicode APIs
*Localization
*Jet 4.0
*SQL Server 2000

He takes you through Unicode and the confusion of multiple code pages. He is the only person who has ever documented using MLang and Uniscribe; Microsoft support claims you cannot do it! He even dabbles in VBScript and its SetLocale function. The book includes important issues on content and how to make sure it will be acceptable in other countries. Perhaps most importantly, he includes information on testing international applications I have not seen in any book, ever. Most VB books do not even mention testing at all. The woman he credits with helping him with the chapter on testing gets my thanks, too!

Best of all, he provides the international keyboard layouts! Just like Nadine's book, only he has a lot more of them. I guess that is the advantage of a book that is released later?

I have seen Michael actively answering questions in the newsgroups. He fulfills an important need for people who have questions on international issues. It is obvious that there is no one who has the same breadth of knowledge as he does. To quote Microsoft's Chris Pratley from his foreword: "If you do globalization work, you'll find just a single page of this book worth the price."

Like Thomas Anderson and Yves Savourel, I am a bit confused about the negative reviews he has gotten. There is nothing in the book that justifies any of the harsh criticisms being levied on it. But maybe I know the reason, after seeing him in action in the newsgroups. Maybe some of the people who he has made mad in newsgroups with his harsh style are getting their revenge? Everyone is entitled to their opinion though, even when they are wrong. I would advise that you ignore them, because they are wrong.

This book is the definitive work on making VB an international product. By the end of the book, I felt like I could take over the world with a VB app or something. It was quite simply that good!

A couple years ago, I developed a commercial application for a major US corporation. The initial spec called for an M18n app; we read everything we could find on the web and still limped in with a nominally i18N app, with plenty of holes to be kludged over. It was basically a matter of "you can't know the answers if you don't know the questions . . .". Having this book available would have saved that corporation thousands of dollars and would have allowed us to produce a much finer product.

If your organization has any thought of developing its product for an international market, it would be very foolish to move forward without having this book on hand.

Frankly, I can't decipher where some of these other reviews are coming from. I suppose if you have never thought about the subject-matter, a single-session straight-through read might be grueling; myself, I found myself laughing at some things that I had suffered over which Mr Kaplan explained clearly in a few paragraphs, and more than once I was delighted to have anticipated accurately the next section or paragraph - in other words, I felt 'communicated with'.

This book is not didactic (except in the original positive sense), self-aggrandizing, millenial (despite its pub. date), or 'cute' - it's a handbook for current and future reference, a programmer-to-programmer communication. Finally, I am very appreciative of the author's attitude that the direction of the communication is as it is not because he is such a clever fellow but because he cares about the subject, had the resources, and did the hard work to assemble accurate (definitive, I believe) information. I wish more programming books were like this.

Microsoft has developed the "Visual Basic 6.0International Package and Deployment Kit" (available online). This tool is mainly to help you localize your VB programs, but that's not enough. Michael Kaplan's book goes beyond that. It detail explains the concepts I resume here:

i18N = Internationalization (or Globalization): mainly a program able to manage in any locale the locale language and settings.

M18N = Multinationalization: mainly a program able to manage (display and input) several languages in any locale.

L10N = Localization: mainly a program able to display its translated and adapted version to several locales.

That is not as easy as it should be because of a Code Page Barrier and other problems. The book fully explains everything and gives the right techniques to solve all the problems! Valid techniques for present and future VB releases. It also includes samples and utilities in its CDROM. You can also find up to date information on the book'sWebpage ... Not all the books have its own one!!

But that's not all: it also explains how to manage multilingual databases, how to create internationalized webpages and components, gives particular information about languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian,...), and lots of reference material! I haven't found another as complete as this is.

I'm a little surprised at the negative comments. This book compiles a lot of useful information and many examples that anyone can use to build enabled VB applications. Internationalization and localization are not easy topics and I suppose some sections of the book may be oriented to an audience who has already a basic understanding of those subjects. I certainly didn't find anything that could justify harsh criticisms, especially when so few books exist on the topic.

The title really sums up how I felt about this book. It was really good in terms of content but suffered a lot due to really uneven editing. I have seen Mr. Kaplan's posts in newsgroups and he tends to type too fast and misspell a lot of words, so I am sure they are "his" typos. But isn't that what editors are for?

The overall style is good, though he does tend to ramble as others have mentioned. I preferred the Symmonds book for writing style, but I prefer flash over substance so the message is more important than how it is delivered. Maybe they could write a book together or something? With a publisher than puts more effort into the editing job?

This book is great! I could not figure how to add international support to any of my VB applications, and the help files were useless. Then Michael comes in and tells me all about font character sets, Unicode, formats, database collations, locales, translation and everything else that I did not understand at all.

The book literally saved my job because my boss was getting pretty upset at all those question marks that were showing up instead of characters in the application I wrote. But just before my review, I was able to waltz into his office, show him the book, and prove to him that a lot of people have this problem, and show him I had the solution. I like best that Michael (or does he prefer "michka"?) actually gave me a lot of answers to all the questions that my boss asked me.

The one thing I want to know is why didn't he write this book a year ago? It seems like he could have sold a lot more copies!

This book provides an approachable guide for the somewhat daunting task of localizing applications written with VB. Code samples provided with the book and on the author's excellent website provide a good foundation for the VB code needed to make your application global. As other reviewers have mentioned, this book describes the process directly with the VB programmer as the intended audience. I think the book also provides a good understanding of locales,lcid, codepages, etc. (whether you are a VB programmer or not) that is critical to successfully implementing globalization. The author does a very good job of providing details of the globalization process from start to finish, not just the intricacies of the code as it relates to Visual Basic. In particular, I have found that it gives the developer a very solid understanding of how VB is handling ANSI and Unicode under the covers, and how to ensure that conversions are accomplished as you intended. I recommend this book as a must have if you are thinking of taking your Visual Basic application to a global audience.

This book is the one that makes it happen. I was at the PDC where they talked about VB7 and they were not saying much about what the features would be next version (only two talks that even mentioned it), but I do know they did not say much about the features in VB6.

But this book made it possible to make the jump with our product today. I especially found all of the information on "multinationalization" useful since that is the very type of application that I need to put together (one that supports many languages). The book pointed us to several Unicode controls that could be used for this, and took me through all the font and other issues that must be taken care of for the controls to work.

Michael's talk on databases was also really useful, especially all of the information about SQL Server 2000's COLLATE keyword. I was able to convince the company I work for to move from SQL Server 7.0 with this information and how it could be used. He is obviously also a big fan of Jet 4.0, but he is very clear on its limitations (though the fact that he can run his site on it is very impressive).

The one thing that I was disappointed as that there was not as big of a discussion about XML encoding as I would have liked, I think that would have been something to include, especially with all of the ocus on XML (he talks about it briefly but does not go into a lot of detail).

Overall, a wonderful effort, and I am really glad Michael wrote the book!

When I found out that Michael Kaplan was writing a book, I was a little bit scared, not because I thought he lacked the knowledge to do so, like some reviews suggest, but because there would be too much knowledge, and what if I would have problems understanding the issues? Even though most of the articles that I've read from him didn't make me feel that way, but it's different towrite a 600 page book than writing just an article. Even if the book did prove to be very complex, that would not take away from either the value of the content of the book or the ability of the author. Something like that happened to mewhen I first read Dan Appleman API book, and now it's one of my references on the subject, but I had to read many things before I could understood what Dan was trying to accomplish.

Good for me that the supposition didn't confirm to be real, and the beginning of the book with the glossary helped a lot on that, because there was in my head a lot of confusion on some of the terms, and that caused some problems reading some articles on this same subject, but with all the explanation up front I felt more comfortable progressing...

And then you start reading Part I and you find stuff and problems that you have known about and that you have felt on your day to day basis, and how well they are explained. Plain English that everyone can understand, growing pace on knowledge that the author start introducing without me perceiving the fact. Eventually you realize you are understanding things that you never imagined that you would understand in the first reading, and you do not have to go over it again and again to understand what is being said. When you finish reading a part, you get the feeling that you learned a lot.

BIG QUESTION: Why do I think that reading this book is important? The US is a very big country and everyone speaks the same language, they tend to forget that there are other languages in the world, besides English. In Europe where I live the countries are smaller, and they all have different languages and customs. The European Community is opening many markets for developers, because many companies are expanding to other countries in the EC, and the ones that don't follow this trend will surely be crippled. Companies are thinking more and more about having clients in different countries with unique languages and customs. In the same way, the WWW is opening an even more vast market, almost in the same manner.

Even if you don't have an immediate need for a international application, it is far better to know what can be done and what are the problems are that you will be facing, and the book will help you perceive this problems. And if you are urgently in need of developing such applications, the book gives hands on solutions, with lots of examples ready to work that will save you a lot of time. This will let you concentrate much more on the application and not so much on the internationalization of it.

Please excuse my bad English, Pedro Gil

This book does give good overview of some basic conceps but is very unclear. I tried to run samples on windows 2000 server machine with all language packs installed but the samples just don't work at all! The book contains more of an overview kind of material rather than how to do an actual application in VB!