Customer Reviews

Professional Visual Basic 6 XML

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From beginning to end, this book extensively covers the XML interface to VB. This book incorporates the fundamental ideas behind XML and gives thorough examples of how and where Visual Basic comes into the picture. I've read some other books on the market that just briefly touch on topic's that this book ends up disecting and, in the process, actually EXPLAIN to you just what is taking place in the code. I recommend this book for a moderate to experienced programmer in VB - they'll teach you the XML you need to know in order to be truly knowledgable.

Let's face it, there aren't many Visual Basic/XML related books out there right now. My best suggestion is really think about why you want this book. I bought it because I'm primarily a Visual Basic programmer and I had been working with XML over the web, and I wanted to pick up this book and see what ideas these authors had for integrating XML in to their VB app projects. I wasn't working on a relevant project myself and that was part of the reason I lost interest in this book so fast.

This book definitely is not for beginners of Visual Basic and in fact, I would definitely suggest having some prior knowledge of XML even though the first two chapters provide a quick intro to XML. Perhaps this isn't a comment so much about the book as it is about using XML in VB, but having to learn and use the Microsoft XML DOM 3.0 library reference within Visual Basic meant there were tons of examples and lots and lots of code to type up. In fact, the authors actually create a VB program that parses XML code and it is somewhere along the lines of 10 pages of code!

This book has its moments, I liked the sample application chapter to see how it all tied together and if you love examples, you will see TONS of them throughout this book -- if you are familiar with Wrox, half the text in this book is in grey shading (meaning code example). But overall, as other reviewers have also pointed out, it covers a great deal of stuff without doing one particular thing exceptionally well (sample application withstanding). If your boss has definitely said "Mix XML into your VB app!", this book is probably your best choice. But if there was one thing I learned from this book, it's that I'd rather continue to use XML over the web than in my desktop or distributed VB applications right now.

Of all the XML books I have, this one certainly takes the cake. The chapter on DOM is excellent. The SOAP chapters are a real gem. I had some problem with one the XSLT sample working, I contacted the author and got a response within few hours with the latest source code. The other Wrox book, Professional XML by Stephen Mohr et al is great too. These red books rock.

The following is a sentence from page 131 paragraph 1 of this book: "After declaring a generic Node object to serve as the parent node for the new node, and a variable to hold our function response, which we optimistically set to True - which will be changed if our attempt at adding the node fails, we check to see if the node index is within bounds, using IsNodeIndexOK, described just after this function."

The logical flow to the entire book in not much better.

This makes learning anything about XML and VB difficult. I have spent more time attempting to determine what the authors are tring to say than I have learning about XML.

I was able to work with the sample code to some extent. But even the sample code was incomplete and more difficult to follow than necessary.

With a complete rewrite this could possibly be a good book.

I read a 1/3 of the book (the sections I bought the book for). So far the book has been invaluable for the project I am working on. However, this is NOT an easy book: the material is complex no matter how you present it and I had to go over it again and again to gain sufficient understanding of it.

I purchased this book to learn to do DOM programming, not to use the code provided by the authors. I was hoping for clear examples, instead I got a book that expects me to download their sample code or type it all in (and there is ALOT) in order to easily follow the samples. Typically this would be fine, but a majority of the functions and classes you can download are poorly explained, or not explained at all. This book is more like instructions on how to use a lot of code written by the authors to manipulate XML.
I own two other WROX books, these book were easy to follow and gave just the right amount of code to get me going. This book does neither. Big disappointment.

This is one of only two books on the market presently that attempt to describe how you can integrate XML into your VB project. The only chapters I found useful, however, were 1 through 3. This book alone was insufficient to teach me the basics of XML and how I could integrate it with my VB project. I had to do a great deal of research on the Web to supplement the information provided in this book. The authors quote extensively from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which can be read directly and more up-to-date on the Web.

The most useful information I derived from this text was the introduction to XML covered in Chapter 1 and the understanding that there are two ways to parse XML in a VB project: using either the Document Object Model (DOM) or Simple API for XML (SAX). The authors describe how to use the Microsoft XML parser (MSXML), and at the time this book was written, MSXML supported only the DOM. As of July 2000, however, it also supports SAX. Therefore, the text covers only MSXML's support of the DOM interface.

The editing of this book is sloppy, so it was a challenge to match the references in the text to what actually appears on the accompanying CD. Once I located the appropriate files, however, I did find it useful to work through the DOM examples. The SAX examples, though not supported by the MSXML at the time (I had to download a third-party tool to work through the examples) were useful insofar as I gained a clear understanding of the differences between manipulating XML using the DOM and SAX interfaces.

Once I mastered XML, I haven't found any need to reference this book again.

I looked for a book that would explain how I can use msxml.dll. This book had lots of examples that I used in my own app. The content was accurate, and simply laid out. Its worth the money!

The book is well written, has many examples, gets from the basics of vb and xml til complex stuff. it also explains dom. negative aspects: the chapter treating xml and databases could be better, also the chapter treating xml and xsl through dom. recommended for average developers.

This is has been a disappointment for me. I purchased this book because of a project I am working on. It told me everything I already know and gave terribly laid out examples.

I was never quite sure working through the examples if the code was required or if the Authors were merely showing us what they could do with XML/VB.