Customer Reviews

MapBasic Developer's Guide

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

 

 

Well, maybe not quite, but close. Ideal for those with a moderate to good programming background (I'm definately the former). You need to own MapBasic (which isn't bundled with MapInfo)to get the most out of the book, but you may be interested to know that it goes into a reasonable amount of detail re: linking with VB. Write the application in VB and send it to MapInfo, no need for MapBasic!. Comes with a floppy disk with over 4Mb of example code, including a basic Map Viewer developed in VB. I'm "teaching myself MapBasic" and, although I have some programming background, I'm finding this book invaluable. Good for creating those mini-apps to automate tedious, repetitive tasks.

This book contains a lot of useful information in the way of sample code. Unfortunately the sample code has little in the way of step by step explanations. If I wanted to wade through someone elses code figuring it out for myself I would go to the Online archives. This book is absolutely not for the beginner and will make an intermediate think twice about what you've gotten yourself into. There are also many errors in the index which makes looking up information quite difficult as well. In all I would say it's a decent book but it could have been put together a lot better and could have provided readers with better explanations of what was going on in the samples. One section around page 200 has 3 pages of text followed by 29 pages of Code then followed up with 3 more pages of text. I really feel that code imbedded comments are not sufficient when readers are trying to fully understand the programming language.

Not bad for inexperienced developers. The integrated mapping section seems to have been copied directly out of the Mapbasic users guide - you'd be better off with the Mapbasic users guide.