Customer Reviews

Using Visual Interdev 6

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

You simply cannot find a better introductory book than this one on Visual InterDev 6. Michael Amundsen gives an oustanding tutorial on the InterDev environment, then moves on to build a solid understanding of planning, designing, and implementing web applications.

This book will quickly and easily bring the beginning web developer up to speed on Visual InterDev 6, HTML forms, Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript), Active Server Pages (ASP), and delivering database content to the web... everything you need for real-world server-side web development.

The author walks the reader through tons of step-by-step hands-on examples with crystal-clear explanations. And the organized format of the book makes it a great reference that I go back to again and again.

When I set out to learn ASP, I wanted to learn the only integrated development environment (IDE) that was built for ASP - Microsoft's Visual InterDev. Take it from me, a professional web application developer... this is THE book to get started with.

If you are a beginner to intermediate this book is for you. It explains every tool and menu item of the programming package with easy to follow steps and examples. It explains the problem, the line by line coding, the options available and the results. It also gives you real live examples and tips. I'm a beginner and I love this book. I went through 5 different books before this one and they were either to hard for me to understand or too far away from the subject. This is a great book.

This book will provide you with a fast way to get up and going in Visual Interdev. Coverage of the basics of DTCs is excellent. VID has a lot of breadth and requires knowledge of ASP, which you will be better equipped to understand after you read this book. After reading this book I found the on-line ASP docs from Microsoft sufficient. Mr. Amundsen's book provides some very nice information on ADO. You get information on using it both at a low-level and using DTCs. Learn the low-level approach first and the DTCs will make much more sense. The author supports a mailing list and web site with some great tutorials and a FAQ area. The list and site with the author's support constitute a great resource for learning the more advanced topics.

The good reviews here on Amazon helped me make this book my choice. Sorry to say it hasn't gone so well. The first few chapters are ok (I learned a lot), and the writing style is fine for me, but the errors make it frustrating to use. I started by writing down the errors that leave you wondering "Did I do something wrong, or is this another error in the text?", and stopped after 8th one. I don't think the best way to learn is to constantly correct errors in your textbook. The last straw for me was the database chapters. The book does not come with a CD-ROM with the examples.. The database chapters reference sample databases to learn by, but without the sample databases from the website, the chapters are very difficult to learn anything from. I'm cutting my losses, and beginning my search for another Interdev book. I recommend you learn from my experience and don't repeat my [mistake].

I gave the book a 4 star rating because of the nice layout and numerous examples (most of which work!). The only information missing is how to configure the client and servers. The author assumes that you have a system, network, and database admin whom have set everything up for you in advance. Good luck getting the data bound controls to work if you don't have prior understanding of NT and SQL Server authentication!

After all the nice reviews this book got, I was looking forward to "read and learn"....BUT I was dissapointed. If you now the basics of HTML and VBScript, you can skip the first 400 pages. After them Amundsen does every lesson in way "you are a student and therefore stupid"-way. I dont see any relavance in telling people how to add a ASP page to their project in EVERY lesson. Some of the lesson doesn't work the way he said it would, he doesn't cover servervariables very good, he "cheats" in some of the lessons (not writing what he ACTUALLY did to get to the result), it's almost impossible to get the "downloadables" from the support website and his coverage of Active X Documents in connection with VID is VERY skinny. I think that I would recommend this book to VisualBasic programmers going for the web or absolute webbeginners, but thats about it.

This book will serve it's purpose well for the beginner, it touches some very important and interesting issues that were covered in other books, and the author uses that claim in far too many subjects, in my opinion. It features a lot of text that involves the very important issues of using InterDev, but what about the technologies that make it all work? ASP, VBScript, SQL, ADO, HTML are all beeing discussed, but in a manner to make you ask for more... much more. It's a good book to play a first step, but if controlling InterDev isn't your problem... you'll need another book.

This is one of the best books that I have read. It is designed for beginners and does it's job well. It flows very well from section to section and clearly explains common pitfalls and problems. I only hope that the author will write a more advanced book.

Mike Amundsen has been one of (if not *the*) mainstays of the Visual InterDev newsgroups. If you want a book by someone who is continually showing that he knows what he's talking about by giving correct answers to a variety of real-life users of the product, then this is the book for you.

Note that this book is (to parapharase Mr. Amundsen) meant to be a solid introduction, not a comprehensive reference.

This book demonstrates extensive client-side scripting using VBScript -- literally hundreds of pages are devoted to it... Netscape does not use VBScript. So... if you don't want to alienate half of the web-browsing population steer away from this book.

Suggestion for the next edition: Demonstrate where appropriate server-side VBScripting and client-side JavaScripting.