Customer Reviews

Jeffrey McManus' Database Access with Visual Basic 6

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I absolutely love this book! The book is so clear and easily readable, I found myself breezing through the examples. I loved the coverage of SQL Server and SQL itself. McManus doesn't assume that the reader has any other tool but VB6, and explained the many database features of the language that I had never used before. I did not even know that VB6 provided a SQL query designer.

McManus also delved into Active Server Pages and other topics that were very interesting, but reserved such subjects for the end of the book.

I loved the writing style and the tutorials. I found not a single error in the step-by-step instructions for setting up SQL Server or the connections in VB. This book is full of useful information, and is my sole reference on database programming in VB.

Summary: Novice Visual Basic database developers will love this book!

Jeffrey McManus's "Database Access with Visual Basic 6" book is the only book I have found that explains in detail how to work with databases.

I am a programmer by trade with thirty years of experience and have learned many languages over those years. Although I am new to Visual Basic, I know how to learn new languages. It is a fairly straight-forward process given the right reference guides.

After having purchased six complete reference guides for VB6 (from other authors), I finally came across McManus's gem. None of the other six books explained in sufficient detail how to really learn the language beyond the superficial level or how to connect to and process databases.

If you are a professional developer, this is the book for you.

This is one of the best books that i have purchased relating to Visual Basic (and i have lots of them) i've been programming in Basic before it was "Visual" - on and off for 15 years now. The author goes straight to the point, gives you examples that work, builds up chapter by chapter and explains the theme in a very easy to understand way. For once i dont get a lot of babling and fancy words, but a straight down to earth talk. Unlike some other authors that spend a lot of time in trivial matters, this book tells you how to do stuff - right now!. I like the way the author explains SQL, Internet Databases, ASP pages and the things that are important to get the darn thing to work. I am keeping this one in my reference library.

What a wonderful book! You can't seriously start writing professional VB application if you don't have this book. Any intermediate user should get it ASAP. Keep in mind, it's not for learning VB, you should first get an introductory book for that. However, I can't give it 5 stars. First, the book's first printing is from Jannuary 1999, it favors DAO a lot more than ADO (which is Microsoft's actual leading technology in data access) and he consistly uses ADO with ODBC (which is a good way to slow down a perfectly running application). Good overviews offered regarding SQL Server and Active Server Page, but just overviews. Get it, read it, use it. After that your application will be much better and you'll know in which field of databases you want to focus. If you want DAO then you are fine. For ADO, ASP or IIS you'll need something for more advanced users.

This book is concise and filled with examples, screenshots and thorough descriptions of the entire process of database access and manipulation using VB. I recommend it to anyone interested in such a subject. It covers various db engines and gives a brief overview of SQL queries as well as delving whole-heartedly into ADO, DAO, activeX, ASP and just about anything else you'd care to know about. And nothing is skimped on. McManus also covers remote database access and multiuser Jet databases

We (a small but intrepid triad of VB developers toiling inside of UNIX country) had spent THREE MONTHS trying to get an ActiveX.EXE component to work on the server. Those three months were the three months we were behind on our schedule, with impatient and increasingly skeptical (internal) customers waiting. We just didn't understand why it worked perfectly in some circumstance, not at all in others, and usually somewhere in between. We were literally at wit's end when I began perusing this book off the shelf at a local bookstore. I was looking for any book on DCOM that might actually be useful (having been through several that weren't), and when I noticed that he had a chapter with a section entitled "ActiveX EXEs Are Tools of the Devil" I knew I had finally made a step forward. The next day we had the app running distributed (the server as a .dll under MTS) and it has been stable and solid for a couple of days now.

One thing this experience has done is to make me question the "expert" status of most authors. We scoured a number of texts that talk about DCOM, but when it came right down to the details of actually getting a distributed project up and running they sort of gloss over any problems encountered. This makes me suspect they have either not actually used DCOM to distribute an app, or that they can't resolve the errors and don't want to appear ignorant or admit failure. I salute McManus for having the guts to write the truth about EXEs and DCOM. It saved us...I don't know how much. I don't think we would have lasted much longer before getting cut off (which would have been terrible since the actual code of our app worked perfectly on one machine..it was strictly a DCOM issue).

I hope he keeps the books coming. This one stands out on a shelf full of rehashes of the MSDN Library.

After you learn how to create forms and vb language constructs, buy this book and go cover-to-cover. Data makes the world go round, and McManus shows you how to use VB to get it.

Is a great beginners book it explains DAO and working with MS-Access using Visual Basic 6. It does not explan how to run a MS-Access query on visual basic at run-time. It is a great book for those for those working with a Three-Tier Cleint/Server Architecture.

I'm a beginner with an intermediate knowledge of ASP and VBScript. I wanted to learn more about both topics and more about VB and this was a great place to find it! McManus gave great examples that made things easy to understand. I consider myself a fairly advanced user of computers and an intermediate level programmer. This book was good for me -- explained things very well but never talked down to me.

This easy-to-understand book not only teaches you how to access VB but also other equally important things like generating reports and using 3rd party tools to display information. It also gives the reader a glimpse of MTS and how VB programmers can take advantage of it. It has also helped me a lot in in my review for MS certification exams 70-175 and 70-176.