Customer Reviews

Object-Oriented Application Development Using the Caché Postrelational Database

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Unfortunately, as with most books in this genre (OODB), the examples and explanations are limited to very simple designs. Furthermore, even the small amount of information dedicated to the design explanations is not enough to wet the appetite for even the most inexperienced individuals.

Removing the 'install' chapter and adding a chapter to dissect a simple 'Address' database with embedded lists of phones, addresses, emails, relationships, and more would go a LONG way. It is disappointing that the authors took the typical beginners approach to a subject that many relational database bigots are dying to beat up on. By not showing a direct comparison to a relational design (function by function, attribute by attribute) they have left InterSystems with little to demonstrate to their potential customers why Cache is a powerful alternative to the status quo.

Shame... Could have been such a terrific book and demonstrative example of how and why OODBs will eventaully rule the real world. Until then we will have to wait for the sequel and hope that it can address the shortcomings of this book.

I have been studying this book for over a year,
and though I have gotten to feel like I know my way around a Cache system, only been working with it a year (MUMPS too for that matter), there is too much information, Undocumented (WOLF KOELING<SP?> will agree that Intersystems offers not to divulge. The book hits all the basics. Devices, servers, clients, GUI tools, $ZU hell, CSP, but with 15 pages to use per section it has to try and describe it, thats not quite enough. ALl in all its helpful, though, my advice is to ditch the book and read the newsgroup. People are very willing to help there.

Intersystems' Caché Postrelational Database is a relatively little known but very powerful & extremely scalable database engine, that has very few -if any- serious competitors in that features/price/performance group, especially after Intersystem changed their licensing policy recently.

The book gives detailed information about Caché's way of handling all major database functions, explains in a nice manner how to get it up & running ( at least on Windows this is actually so easy that it's almost not necessary to waste many words about it), provides a good introduction into Caché's specific as well as general object-oriented programming but stays a bit short on webapplications and information/assistance about errors & error-codes. It almost appears that the authors had a deadline to meet, and finished the web-part a bit too fast.

However, this sounds worse than it really is: Caché's online tutorial and documentation fill this gap, so to start, to learn more and to have a very nice, very compact language reference in your bag or next to your keyboard, this book is probably the best thing to have, especially in conjunction with the online materials.

The authors always keep their focus on what's necessary, it's easy to understand without simplifying the subject. In good Springer-Verlag manner it's slightly overpriced, but its size, layout and paper is very nice; too pretty almost: You certainly don't want to write notes into it, so you might end up with lots of Post-Its between the pages.

Unlike most other programming languages and databases this book prooves that you don't need 12 different 800-pages manuals, tutorials, references etc to accomplish one thing. In my opinion, besides the performance and ability to easily integrate with almost all other languages and platforms, this is one of the best aspects of Intersystems Caché.

This book is mainly a summary of the Caché elements and keywords - fairly the same as in the Caché html documentation. What the book lacks are proper examples. Caché is an object-oriented layer over old, procedural MUMPS, but the few examples in the book are mainly examples of the old MUMPS syntax (like a C++ book with all examples in plain C).
Two examples:
1. It describes that arguments of methods can be called either by value or by reference (p. 43), but it describes neither how a by-ref argument is defined (ByRef), nor how a method with by-ref arguments is called (with a dot). It is, however, described for old procedures (p. 138).
2. It describes that the DATATYPE %Date has a CLASSMETHOD (= static method in C#/C++) LogicalToDisplay (p. 36), but it does not describe what its argument is and how it is called. When calling a classmethod on a class you need to use the ##class() macro, but that's not described until page 171. Apparently, in case of a datatype like %Date, Caché creates wrappers for each property of that type (with the property name as prefix) and those are the ones to be called.

The thing with Caché is that it is fairly illogical and that the compiler agrees with nearly everything, so you can't get to business without proper examples. We bought this book hoping to get more examples than the Caché documentation provides, but alas, not this book. I rate this book 1 star, since it is quite expensive, while the contents are very, very meager.

Having this said, this is the only book about available about Caché, and is also on the cd-rom as a searchable pdf. So, if you're not familiar with MUMPS globals either, it will probably hold some interesting information for you.

I didn't find this book to be very helpfull. You might as well read the online documentation.

Have gotten extensive use out of this book from my time as a cache developer. Good guide for a programmer who's new to cache, and then later on as a reference guide for an intermediate to experienced developer. Everyone in the dev team got some use out of this as a reference - good to have in the team.

This book is a good book for beginners who need an introduction to object programming as well as Cache Objects. This book was very helpful to me as I am a beginning programmer in both Cache Objects and Objects in general. I would recommend this book. If one is not new to objects but new to Cache Object Script they can skip the introduction to objects section and proceed with the Cache Object Script section. It is a good reference on the Cache Object script language. The only thing is it would have been good if there were a bit more examples in the Cache Object script and Cache Object sections. Some programming assignments to do on one's own and an answer sheet in the back of the book to these assignments would have been good as well. It would have given one a chance to put the concepts into practice themselves and then check their answers to see if they were on the right tract. At any rate I think this is a very good book.