Customer Reviews

Using Powerbuilder 6 (Special Edition Using)

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

 

 

While the book is good for referencing topics when you already know PowerBuilder. You might find yourself lost if you're starting out and trying to follow the example from the book. There are points where the figures in the book don't match where you are at that point in the code. Not to mention the fact that the code that you can download is different then the code descibed in the book. Definetly not a book to learn PowerBuilder from.

There are numerous errors throughout which would turn many developers away from PB, especially beginners. I cannot recommend this book.

The book does not help beginners at all as it claims to. It assumes a prior knowledge of PB otherwise you get lost. The project which the book takes you through has parts missing when you compare it to the downloadable version. You go crazy trying to figure that out. There are other books out there which are much better. Do not waste your money on it esp beginners as this book will only make you hate PB.

Contains a lot of good examples. I've been using PB since version 2.0 and I've found that I've learned a lot of things from presentations by the author. This book is a lot like Bill's presentations: Informative, Insightful, and Engaging. There is something for beginning PB programmers that want to become advanced and the advanced programmers that want to get up to speed on the new PB features. The PB-Internet chapter is worth the price of the whole book.

This was the textbook chosen by my educational institute to introduce us to PowerBuilder and Object-Oriented Fundamentals. I'd have to say it fails on each of those counts.

You're not introduced to PowerScript until nearly halfway through the book, the code is NOT laid out in a step-by-step fashion AT ALL after the first chapter or so (and even then), there are coding errors all over the place, and the finished product that you can download has all sorts of inconsistencies with what's in the book (it's as though they kept the application the same from PowerBuilder 5 and never bothered to check the new text against it or something).

I'm in the process right now of trying to reverse engineer the example from Que's website and compare my own to figure out what snippets the book has omitted that are preventing my application from functioning properly. Thank you, William Heys, for depriving me of some much-needed sleep. :P~

I have not learned too much from this book

Its a very good book but I don't think it targets beginners as much as it claims to. There is a tutorial that runs through the book but it doesn't give concise instructions of the steps one should follow. If these were clearly indicated I would give the book 5/5. I feel that one should know a little about Powerbuilder before attempting to approach this book. However it is so detailed that it takes a while to complete, this can be percieved as a good or a bad thing.

For someone who just wants to learn the PowerBuilder painters, the other books are fine. The strength of this book is that it teaches you to build in PowerBuilder the RIGHT way...by building in an object-oriented way. Most new PowerBuilder developers know just enough to shoot themselves in the foot. This book takes more effort, but its examples are much closer to real development than the other intro books I have reviewed.

I feel I have to disagree with the other reviewers - I bought this book and learned very little from it. It requires trudging through hundreds of pages before you even learn the basics. I know many others who have had similar experiences with this book - it was 'recommended reading' on a PowerBuilder course I took. My advice? Buy Official PowerBuilder Fundamentals - it's head and shoulders above Que's offering.

This is the first powerbuilder book, I read that seems to be not only a compendium but delivers as well many pratical nice choosen examples. On the first look, you got the impression that this is only an adapted book to the next version, but if you really take a look you will remark many details which are carefully done. I recommend that book to all newcomers to powerbuilder as well as a to experienced developers. The index is very well done.