Customer Reviews

Practical Standards for Microsoft Visual Basic (DV-MPS General)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

James' presentation of the material and solid examples of the subject matter are worth many times the retail price of this book. Any devloper who works with a team of developers will see results and value in implementing even just a few of James' suggestions. Even if a developer is not in a team environment, implementing standards will allow the code to be easier to understand to others or to the same person in the future when changes will need to be made.

I wish more developers would follow the suggestion of the book to take steps to increase the readability and maintainability of their code. Being in a position where I have inherited numerous projects from numerous developers, i can only dream of the hours I would have saved had their code been formatted in a similar fashion, and using a standard for variable names would have been like winning the lottery!

This book is a great foundation and starting point for the Visual Basic Developer (new to programming or with experience) to begin to implement Code Standards and increase the readability and maintainability of their code.

I cannot express eloquently enough the relief I felt in finding a standards book aimed solely at Visual Basic since most standards books are aimed at C/C++.

I highly recommend this book to every Visual Basic Developer and believe that every developer should keep this book within reach at all times in their developing environment.

A sincere thank-you to Mr. Foxall for taking the time to do what we all *know* needs to be done in standardizing our code and releasing his findings to us in such a well-designed format and proving his assertions with real code blocks to show the incorrect vs. a more correct way of accomplishing the task.

If you are a Visual Basic programmer, you *NEED* this book. The e-version of the book on the included CD-ROM is just awesome and makes this book even more useful since you can have an electronic copy at your disposal when you need it.

Thank you thank you thank you! As a person in charge of 5 programmers, I can tell you that managing code of 5 people sometimes feels like I'm managing 5 different projects in 5 different languages.

Mr. Foxall has put together a book that will now allow code to be written consistently and efficiently. Now, if someone quits, it will be so much easier to have someone else take over their code. That isn't to say that it's going to be easy to get our older code up to using these standards. Actually, it will take a bit of work (we should have been doing these things all along, but never knew exactly what to do). I'm going to get a copy for all of our developers.

Kudos!

The author has obviously written Visual Basic code for a living. His work has a definate 'been there' feel to it. He offers practical advice on writing better code and creating better user-interfaces.

I found the chapter on architecting modules and procedures particularly helpful. While most books don't lend themselves well to an on-line format, this book's on-line format on the CD is exceptional in that it makes it easy to reference the material - which you'll want to do often.

I keep mine with my staples: Code Complete and Dan Appleman's Guide to the API.

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This is a very good book for someone looking for a set of standards for writing Visual Basic code. The author covers pretty much all VB topics as related to coding standards.

I've been programming in VB for many years, so much of this was not new to me, but it did have some helpful tips. His chapter on comments is very good and had some helpful insight for writing better comments.

The last chapter covers how to set up Visual Source Safe, a topic that I was interested to see included here. It is somewhat unrelated, but it is in fact a very useful step-by-step guide to setting up this tool for source code control. This alone makes this book worthwhile if you're not using VSS now and would like to.

A very well written book about what you should have learned in college (or your first programming class in high school). If you program for a living you should be applying these concepts already, but if you slept through your software design classes then definatly read this!

I don't like the authors frequent use of the goto statement, and I'm not a big fan of Hungarian notation but those are the only two negitives I find (and hence the reason for 4 stars). He does an exceptional job of showing both the wrong way and the right way to accomplish the topic he is covering (for instance having only 1 exit in a sub)..

Well worth the read.. matter of fact I'm going to be suggesting this to the project managers at work as a "must read" for new hires and veterans alike.

I have read countless VB articles, and books, and have often longed for a one-stop resource about structured VB programming. When working with different teams over different periods of time, I have often found that little or no standards are in place. Consequently, the time to get a feel for someone else's code can sometimes be more than the time to fix it.

Foxall's book isn't an end all to programming in VB. And some may feel that he is telling you how to code, and stifiling what many programmers fear-their individuality. This simply isn't the case. Foxall breaks down all the aspects of a VB project, and how to best document, declare, write, and design your code.

This is the most practical book I have ever read. Thanks for a wonderful book. And more thanks for something that's equally as practical.

Foxall's work is valuable not only for what it encourages and discourages with clear, persuasive examples of good versus poor VB programming practices, but also for the compelling way in which he unifies the underlying principles of his thinking into an elegant advocacy of extensible, maintainable code.

This book belongs in every VB team leader's right-hand desk drawer.

richard_stout@hotmail.com

Many VB developers are used to writing the code anyway they please, however, when you or anyone else needs to debug your applications couple of weeks later, it's harder to understand what is going on in the code unless you follow some standards. This book tells you what standards you should follow, offers examples, explanations, and reasons.

Get it, because you will learn something, regardless of the version of VB you are currently using.

There are some books you wish every VB programmer would read, this is one of them. I used this book as a helpful reference to develop programming standards for two developer groups. I did not agree with all the standards in the book. I felt that some of them were not actually the standards followed in the industry, but most were well laid out and if followed would improve the VB programming industry.

Some areas were covered more indepth than others and those that were not covered so well probably should have just been left out. (Source Safe, Error Handling [get an error handling book])

All-in-all a very good book and I don't believe there is a better VB standards book on the market today.

Although I progam in VBA, primarily in Access, I wanted a book to help me with using standards in my work. I was not disappointed in buying this book. The use of Directives to synthesize the descriptive information into succinct programming rules was very good; the Directives should be included in a separate tear-out card on heavy stock so that it can be handy at all times.

I found particularly helpful the portions on Naming Conventions, Select Case...End Case, Create Thoughtful and functional Message Boxes, and Central Error Handlers. I can now create intelligent and useful Message Boxes and am looking forward to writing Central Error Handlers based on the books suggestions. One of the most useful and well organized books I have ever bought.