Doing Objects in Microsoft Visual Basic 6 [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Deborah Kurata (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
For an approachable guide to software design and new Visual Basic 6 features, take a look at Deborah Kurata's Doing Objects in Visual Basic 6, a guide to what's best in today's Visual Basic.

The book begins with a clear explanation of basic object-oriented concepts, as well as a listing of new Visual Basic 6 features. The first half of the book presents Kurata's Goals, User Interface, Implementation, Data Design, Strategies (GUIDS) software design process. First she defines project requirements, including project scheduling; and then she shows the importance of looking at goals, which leads to defining user scenarios and the objects for a system. Designing the user interface comes next, with attention to menus and form design. Implementation issues follow, including a discussion of today's multitiered system architectures. Next come sections on data design, with database tables. Finally, the design process looks at strategies for actually coding a project. (Here, advice on such topics as naming conventions and error handling will help you write more maintainable Visual Basic code.)

The second half of the book looks at how to build programs with Visual Basic and how to begin with class design (with twelve common questions about classes), including information on persistence and using collections. More detail on the inner workings of Visual Basic class interfaces and ActiveX follows. The author presents a simple ActiveX control and surveys support for database and Internet programming in Visual Basic.

The finished product in this straightforward and intelligent text is a contact management system, which uses a three-tiered data architecture. Overall, this book makes sophisticated object-oriented programming techniques accessible for today's Visual Basic 6 developers. --Richard Dragan

Product Description
Deborah Kurata's Doing Object in Visual Basic 6 provides a foundation for object-oriented design (OOD) by describing fundamental concepts and features of Visual Basic that support these concepts. For each design, this guide takes you step-by-step through a case study. Doings Objects in Visual Basic 6 shows you how to build ActiveX EXEs, ActiveX DLLs and ActiveX controls, how to create database objects using the universal data access strategy, OLE DB, and ADO. It details how to use the new Data View window, the new Data Environment designer, access a database using ADO, the new CallByName function, build data-aware classes, and use the new data binding features. Also find how to create three-tiered, object-oriented database applications using these new technologies and pull all that you've learned together into a functioning application.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education (December 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1562765779
• ISBN-13: 978-1562765774
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,009,039 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great jumpstart into OOD concepts and how they apply to VB6!, July 28, 1999

By A Customer

I agree with some earlier reviews that this book may be preaching to the choir for many established developers. However, if you're a relatively inexperienced developer or new to OOD concepts this book is very well written and worth picking up. I appreciate Kurata's discussion of the development process from a OO perspective. This goes beyond the coding specifics, which can be found in many other books, and gives a process that can be used as a guideline for future projects. In an Op-Ed article in Aug/99 VBPJ the writer discussed why VB gets a bad rap. The author of the article states that essentially it's because of all the "programming wannabe's" never learn anything about application design, they just learn syntax and how to create code. By studying this book, and some of the books referenced by it, and utilizing some of the techniques you can avoid the pitfalls of becoming just another VB Hacker.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Over 600 pages of unrelated information, June 25, 2000

By	Barry Gruber (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book was a major disappointment for me, considering Ms. Kurata's earlier book 'Doing Objects in VB 4.0' was so wonderful.

The main problem with the book is that it does not lay a sold foundation to the subject of OOP. The topics are not presented in a systematic way where each topic builds on the ones already presented.

Although the author builds a single application throughout the course of the book, the relation between each programming topic and the code examples is just not clear. If I had not already been programming in OOP for a year and a half, I would have been completely lost in this book.

Also, the whole first half of the book presents a proprietary OO design methodology (GUIDS) that is not helpful. It doesn't tell me much more than what I know from the old-fashioned structured analysis and design methodologies. The book would be much stronger if the first half was just omitted.

There is some useful information to be gained from the book if you already know OOP. (I learned some things that I have not seen in any other books.) But if you already know OOP, then you can skip over this one entirely.

For a topflight intro to Object Oriented programming in VB, read Peter Wright's book 'Beginning VB6 objects'. Wright's book should be required reading for all VB programmers.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For Professionals ???? Umm... I don't think so, March 20, 1999

By	[e-mail] (King Of Prussia, PA) - See all my reviews

The back of this book claims this is written for the 'Profession' level. I disagree, although I don't know who this is really intended for - newbies to OOA&D, maybe.

I have a basic understanding of OO principles and have been programming with VB for three years. Besides the chapter on interfaces, inheritance and polymorphism there was nothing really new for me here and anything that was new was covered in such brevity as to be completely worthless (DHTML, ActiveX controls). Anything slightly technical was brushed off. In fact, it seemed most of the VB portions of this book was spent asking readers to read other books/articles to get the real facts (a thorough bibliography is a good thing but don't rely on it as the basis for your entire book).

Warning!!! - The first half of this book is about OOA&D (the GUIDS methodology) and has hardly any reference to VB. The GUIDS methodology would only be useful to someone who is completely new to OO concepts. In other words there is nothing new here.

I think this could be a better book if the VB portion of the book was expanded and GUIDS methodology portion was removed completely (maybe put it into its own book).

One final thing I found particularly offensive was the front cover which listed topics that were to be covered in the book. The majority of these topics were barely covered in any kind of depth (e.g. DHTML, IIS applications, 3-tiered components)- false advertising in my book.