10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Leverage your VB skills to provide db web content., November 4, 1999
This review is from: WebClasses From Scratch (Paperback)
We all know how difficult it is to find a book that is truly worthwhile. I have purchased several books on different but related topics and have been trying to synthesize the information into practical steps for a project I am working on.
Then along comes Jesse's book *Webclasses from Scratch* ! Jesse demonstrates how to use VB6, webclasses, SQL,ASP,ADO, and Javascript to produce a web-enabled database application.
I had become frustrated with getting my replacement tags to process properly. I even called Microsoft for help and the tech gave me an answer that did not work... I now see the one key element that was missing and my development schedule is back on track.
This is the ONLY book in print that *specifically* covers webclasses and Jesse does it in his own inimitable style: he assumes you are a novice VB programmer and takes it from there.
I think this is a 5 star book because it covers exactly what the title says, the example is fully functional and useful, and the style makes it very easy reading while teaching you what you want to know. Most importantly because the author demonstrates how the various technologies available to the modern VB programmer can be combined to accomplish a task.
Thank you Jesse, and I encourage you to write another one so you can cover things like how to handle rollbacks with or without MTS.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great tutorial on a great technology, November 1, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: WebClasses From Scratch (Paperback)
This is a great tutorial on WebClasses, and sadly one of the few books to do the technology justice. WebClasses are the Visual Basic 6.0 way to code web pages, and they rule for debugging and general maintainability. Read this book and learn why you should toss Active Server Pages in the trash (can you tell I hate ASP?). The writing is very straightforward and appropriate for someone with very little web development experience (i.e. truly "from Scratch). I lead a team of developers migrating a code base from ASP to VB 6.0 and Web Classes, and this book was very helpful for those with little web development (or even VB) experience. It briefly discusses scalability issues, but if you're looking to put up a high traffic site with the Microsoft toolset, you might be better off with Homer and Sussman's "MTS/MSMQ with VB/ASP" by Wrox.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Turn a classroom experiment into a book for money, February 3, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: WebClasses From Scratch (Paperback)
A few months back, the company I consult for decided to experiment with webclasses. Looking for books, I found this tome in Sam's for less than $10. Since I am starting off this review with this qualifier, you should be able to tell I am not particularly enamored with this book.
If you are an beginner, and do not mind a writer patronizing you at every turn, you might actually be able to glean something from the book in between the diatribes explaining how Mr. Liberty wrote a book about almost every subject in the world of computing, as in the comment: "This book is not about object-oriented analysis and design. I already wrote one of those..." (Chapter 3) and "If that is the case, run right out and buy my misnamed book ...' (Chapter 1).
Mr. Liberty, as a C++ programmer also has a total disdain for Visual Basic, as shown in the following quote: "VB has been something of a toy I've played with in the past but not a language that I would have considered using to build a robust, extensible, maintainable, high-performance commercial application."
Mr. Liberty also shows his lack of knowledge in Visual InterDev when he states that the two tremendous drawbacks to ASP is that it is hard to debug and the code is mixed with HTML. While it is true that ASP is mixed with HTML, I would hardly say that this is necessarily a tremendous drawback. In a performance-only comparison, inline code suffers compared to compiled code, but when you consider other dynamics of application development, such as maintainability, ASP, especially when used as presentation-layer only, wins over compiled code in many ways. As to the "hard to debug" issue, this is only a problem if you a) do not know how to use the InterDev debugging tools and/or b) if you consider true debugging to be running symbolic debug information through the C++ debugging tools.
Mr. Liberty also shows his lack of keeping up with changes in Visual Basic by the use of the deprecated While ... Wend loops. This is understandable for a C++ programmer who uses VB as a toy, but should not rear its ugly head in a Visual Basic book.
In all fairness to this work, those who learn by example will find quite a bit of code to run through in this book. While the details are sketchy on many subjects, the book does cover webclasses to a certain extent. Of course, since the material is very much like a classroom experiment, you will have to figure out how to apply this to your own projects.
If you are serious about Visual Basic Internet applications, the Wrox book VB6 Web Programming is a much better bet as it covers far more than just webclasses.
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