Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Ole Db and Ado in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...)

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

 

 

this is the only book I could find on OLE DB besides SDK docs, so for that alone I am happy to have it. I did find his step by step approach to developing an oledb app was very helpful, once I had gathered enough knowledge from other sources about COM & some basic Ole db knowledge. this is a good book if you are an intermediate at com and have a basic familiarity with oledb and of course have a good grasp of c++; it was at that point that I found the book very helpful. But plan on reading other materials first to get your base understanding of com & ole db before benefitting from this book (and it was annoying to see comments stating that memset was allocating memory). This book does fill a good niche though to help you get from a base understanding of ole db to a very strong intermediate level (helped me do that anyway) and it saved me a lot of time making that leap that I couldn't have done without reading this book.

A lot of computer book authors and publishers take the easy way out. Instead of working hard to produce an original, clear explanation of their topic, they hastily slop together a whole lot of reference material -- anything will do -- put an attractive cover on it, and market it as "just the book you need to understand X". I'm sure I'm not the only one who is sick of these shoddy products. Unfortunately, this book is one of them. The introductory material on COM isn't enough to help a beginner, and is a waste of space for those who already know it. The OLE DB material is little more than a catalog of interfaces - an inferior rehash of the OLE DB documentation. The sample programs (which also add little to what you can already find in the OLE DB Reference) make use of numerous concepts and methods which are nowhere explained. Such samples are useless if you don't already know what they're doing, but if you do already know, then you don't need the book! Why do they think we buy these things?

If you're a beginner at COM, don't even think about buying this book. (There are several good books on COM -- get two or three of them instead.) If, like me, you're looking for an overview of OLE DB, a clear explanation of what it is and how it works, this book doesn't contain anything remotely resembling that.

P.S. There are also many things in this book which I find irritating. Example: since when does memset "allocate memory"? (pp. 40, 41)

This book seems to be mostly a printout of the help documentation with a few frills. It is downright insulting that books like this can actually reach the market :( It is riddled with statements such as 'Using storage interfaces to access BLOBs is covered in Chapter (Day) 5, but there's nothing remotely like that in Chapter 5. You're better off just using the SDK documentation.

This book contains a number of examples, but unfortunately a lot of them are for C++ followed by J++ and finally VBScript. No Visual Basic examples at all. If you principally code in Visual Basic, expect to do a lot of reserve coding from VBScript to Visual Basic.

On the plus side, if you principally code in C++, the examples are fairly usefull and applicable. Also, the examples do not try to write an entire application in one snippet of code and I liked that.

If you need information about ADO with Visual Basic, I would stick to the Microsoft Web Site and their ADO documentation in HTML form (also available in the Ole DB 1.5 SDK).

This was the worst treatment of any computer material I have ever read. This book mostly contained copies of the text directly from the user manuals. The author didn't even bother to read the manuals before hand and copies all the spelling errors and mistypes that appear in the documentation directly into the book. What makes it worse is he introduces more! I would never buy this book, in fact, I think anyone who has should request a refund.

This is one of the best books on OLE DB 1.1 that I have come accross. I wish there was an OLE DB 2.0 version of this book!

This is one of the best treaments of OLE DB and COM that I have read. It provides a complete step-by-step guide to developing OLE DB applications. Simply, it's the best OLE DB/ADO book avilable on the market today!

I use this book frequently when programming. It is not a beginner book for OLE DB. But it does provide excellent examples in many instances of coding.

If you don't know COM, don't read this book. If you do know COM, be prepared for (a) constant reminders that every interface implements AddRef, Release & QI, (b) constant mistakes in method prototypes, and, (c) cut-and-paste mistakes [I didn't know that RIGHT-OUTER-JOIN and LEFT-OUTER-JOIN were identical until I looked in Appendix D]. If you really want to learn about OLE DB and ADO, be prepared to muddle through these types of problems.