Customer Reviews

Symantec Visual Caf Sourcebook

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

 

 

I too wished I'd read the reviews first. I have 3.0c and this book might as well be for another product for all the good it does me. It's amazingly basic - if you have used VC for more than a couple of hours, you could have written it yourself.

I wish I'd read the reviews here before I bought this book elsewhere. I recently bought Visual Cafe 3.0a, and this book is so out of date it useless. I agree with the other reviewers who ask that books about products reveal the version they use. It wasn't until I saw the sentence "the next version of Windows 95 should..." that I realized I was in trouble.

Need I say mor

This book reads like a brochure for Visual Cafe...I can use the manual to walk me through the menu options.

For a book that titles itself "Sourcebook", it is pathetically short of source code examples. There's once decent sample program in the first quarter, and the rest was just fluf.

I suppose this book might be useful if you truly had no clue, but even then I'd question it.

If you are fascinated by the obvious, buy this book. The author seems to feel that telling us that the ImageButton is a button displaying an image is more useful than explaining how to use it, when or why. Entire chapters are devoted to listing the options you can see for yourself on screen without telling what they actually do. It spends a great deal of time and space describing how wonderful visual development is (over and over again, actually), but there are only a very few actual exercises in the book and the interesting one's require you to enter pages of code by hand! The icing on the cake is that nowhere in the book does the author mention that his coverage is limited to the Windows version or acknowledge the existence of the Mac version (in which the screens look quite different). He also doesn't mention up front that the most interesting exercise requires Visual Cafe Pro (which costs a lot more than Visual Cafe. I've got to agree with others who've written to say that this book is a waste of time -- even for beginners.

For beginners only. The claimed coverage of Visual Cafe Pro is pathetic. Some parts of the book sound like they're written by the Symantec Marketing Department. Class/component descriptions are bare-bones ... Visual Cafe itself provides more information. Experienced programmers will find this book irritating to read and completely useless as a reference manual.

The authors spent a lot of time talking about GUI, RAD programming and many of introduction, and not covered real performance of Visual Cafe or Visual Cafe Pro. I think its title should be 'Introduction of Symantec Visual Cafe Sourcebook'.I recommend this book to beginner with little or no GUI or RAD programming experience, and who want to know about Visual Cafe GUI. But if you want to learn Visual Cafe Pro, it's not for you.

This book is a total waste of money. It is useful for learning only what are the menubar options for Visual Cafe. Looks like the author wrote it in a hurry to be the first out with the book and as a result filled the pages with useless stuff.

The book is a quick, general overview of Symantec Visual Cafe; users of Visual Cafe Pro won't find it much use, since less than 20 pages is devoted to data aware applications. Also, although the author covers the standard components, no mention is made of many of the other components Symantec bundles with Visual Cafe, such as menus and forms. In fairness, though, the author welcomes email and when I asked him how to create a dialog box, he responded quickly and cheerfully, even sending me a sample file. Since Symantec's documentation is virtually nonexistent at this point, I would recommend this book to people with little or no programming experience. An experienced programmer, however, will likely only find the book useful for the first week or so; after that, it becomes time to rely on the Symantec newsgroups for information and nitty-gritty implementation details.

Symantec Visual Cafe Sourcebook spends a lot of time listing the names of "widgets", "events", and "event responces" but none explaining the function or the how to