Customer Reviews

ODBC 3.5 Developer's Guide

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Although the author notes this book doesn't contain any Unicode issue, there are many incorrect descriptions regarding the text data type and missing information about ODBC 3.5 new features. For example, column size of data may represent the length of data in characters in case the data is text, while this book describe explicitly "in bytes". The meanings are totally different especially when you handle non-Latin text data. I should recommend the serious user/developer to get Microsoft official documents and I should say this book is not based on ODBC 3.5, rather, ODBC 3.0.

I bought the book based on the Amazon description of it being "complete" and "designed to provide you with everything you need" and was disappointed to find that it does not contain the ODBC SQL grammar. So it is NOT complete. I could not even find any references in it to how to find the SQL Grammar. Without knowing the ODBC SQL grammar it would be hard to write an interoperable application (the point of ODBC after all) with only this book.

The book, however, is excellent (5 stars), especially with the ODBC specification development history, but incomplete, and the Amazon blurbs(1 star) misleading.

A software development book has to be pretty good for me to give it a 5 star rating, and this one really is. An associate of mine said he needed to learn more about ODBC, and I explained that this book is great as a reference AND as a tutorial. That's a claim that can be made about a precious few books. Later, I happened to be reading the foreword (not written by the author of the book), and that's exactly what the guy who wrote it said about this book, and it really is true. Things in this book are where I expect them to be. I don't have to look very long to find what I want. If you need to do ODBC programming, I can't imagine that there's a better book out there to use as a guide.

I bought this book as an ODBC virgin. I had no clue what it did, but I knew I needed to know. This book is good in explaining the fundamentals of ODBC, but when it gets to the part of actually creating code to use ODBC, it falls well short. As a beginner, I need a lot of code to peruse, and I need it to be straightforward. What would have been good is if the author included snippets of C code in the pertaining sections that explained, for example, connecting to data sources, initializing environments, etc. However, no code was ever presented until he started enumerating each of the functions. This was not a smart place to put it. Not only that, but instead of using straightforward C code directly in the example, he all of a sudden wraps ODBC calls in a C++ class, which just serves to muddy the overall picture. It would have been best to leave the ODBC code in straight "C", to make it easier for the beginners to fully understand what was going on.

This is a very good reference book for day-to-day
ODBC programming. It's easy to look up functions for
a particular task and every function has an accompanying
example. As noted earlier it may not completely follow
some of standard but for most of my purpose it's good enough.

My main complaint is that a reference book of
this volume should really be published as a set of HTML
pages with a search engine. (No eBook, please!)

I've spent tons of time wading through ODBC specifications, online help, doc after doc after doc looking for the information that this book provides all in one reference.

Oh, the time I would have saved if this had existed when I started developing ODBC drivers!

The excellent cross-reference between ODBC Spec levels is SO useful. Having great code examples FOR EACH API is wonderful.

From the high-level explanation of ODBC key concepts all the way to the last detailed SQLState, Roger Sanders has provided us with a diamond in the rough of ODBC books... Thanks!

The text does not follow any tutorial standard or style. It is a series of essays followed by detailed examples and verbose documentation. Some thought should have gone into the presentation.

I am a person of learning by example. I don't use all functions of ODBC, but I use whatever I need for my project. For every function I need, there is an example in this book for me to understand. Actually, I learn ODBC from this book

The book is good. There are many samples that were coompiled and worked without extra changes. This book is a good addition to ODBC SDK.

I'm a new learner of ODBC. Through the instruction of this book, I just spent one week implementing a ODBC software component for my job. So I take this opportunity to honestly thank the author for his execellent book.