Customer Reviews

Lotus Notes Developer's Guide: For Users of Release 4.0 Through 4.5

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

 

 

I went through a many-month process of learning Lotus Notes 4.5 development while writing Notes applications. My bookshelf had over three feet of reference books -- the yellow manuals from Lotus and many third-party books. When the project was all done, and I went back to Visual Basic development, Rose's book was *clearly* the most-frequently-used of the whole bunch. Highly recommended!

This book seems to cover all the topics one would hope for, but they all read the same, "This is what you can do - now look a the example on the included CD and figure how on your own". If anything, this book is good for just a quick review of what Notes is capable of doing, but it will not tell you how to do it. The few examples given in the book are pages long script examples that only the most seasoned programers are going to understand.

I purchased this book for two reasons:
(1). The good (although scanty) reviews it had received;
(2) The chapter on web-enabling a Notes db. So far (I've had the book for a month or so), everything I've looked for in this book, I've also found in the Application Developer's Guide and Programmer's Guide Part 2 from Lotus; the "yellow books" (and online help) generally have more detail. The most useful bit of information I came across in this Developer's Guide is a blurb about a bug related to Authors fields. The Domino chapter is sadly poor and basic. I learned more in a day of experimenting and using the "Working With Lotus Notes and the Internet" book from Lotus than I did from this chapter. What I was hoping for is a book that would supplement and expand on the content in the ubiquitous yellow books. I didn't find it here.

If you're a novice, this is a damn good book.

If you're a seasoned programmer with some Notes experience and training who wants to firm up their knowledge of Notes development think twice. There either isn't enough detail in some of the chapters, or you get 30 pages of macro statement descriptions (what is wrong with the help file anyway?).

Still - it's well priced and a good read. Can't complain too much because most of the other books on Notes development are truly woeful.

Didn't get the CD. Why not? Is this normal? Still - I could download the examples and burn my own.

Great Stater in Notes Development but not so much for Advance Notes Developers. It can be very useful for standard routines but not a great Development Resource Book.

Lotus Notes is an unique product, it has a totally different concept from other relational database product such as Oracle, so as a notes developer, I am really interested in books which can tell me what's going on in Lotus Notes Now.

The authors seems to me they are really have hands on experience with notes, and the book filled with solid examples. I had go through all the part of this book, and feels a little bit better notes developer myself now than before.

If you make a living by notes like me, maybe you should think to have one on you book shelf