Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well written - Be careful with concept overload, March 10, 2000
By A Customer
I've read computer books for programmers for at least 12 years. Lhokta is probably the best organized computer book author I've ever read. Wrox always uses presentation style and format to produce excellent books, and Lhotka's writing style is perfect for introducing concepts in an organized way to begginners and people who don't want the first 6 or 7 chapters of a business-oriented VB book to be filled with elementary stuff. Therefore, they complement each other. However, Lhotka seems to be an OOP purist, and by structuring the material the way he does, you get a sense of concept overload, particularly on the first six chapters which deal with the basics of n-tiered architectures, (D)COM itself, and business object analysis. I sense he wants to discipline the reader into not following sloppy coding habits, about which VB is quite forgiving. The examples are excellent, and the respective chapters are compact: if you want to develop, say, an IIS application, all details for structuring it as well as developing an app interface are right there. Very rarely do you have to go back and forth. (That can't really be said about the first four introductory chapters, but he'll go over each concept mentioned in passing later on... so that you don't get lost in a quagmire...)This is a very good book for an intermediate VB programmer, as well as a good reference for advanced ones.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
OK for a beginner, December 10, 1999
By A Customer
Here are a "couple of" (pun on Mr. Lhotka' overuse of the phrase) problems with the book:
1. The design is inappropriate for a web site.
Notice how the author steps around the issues in the ASP section. His ASP example is of minimal use since it does not show one how to add/edit data. If I want to use his design, I need a lot of Session variables around - a not altogether scalable solution.
2. Lack of a Graphical Model
The book really needs a graphical view of the object model with methods and properties ala Visual Modeler.
3. Development of the object model seems a bit haphazard.
The scheme is a bit harder to follow than should be. I think the whole thing should have been sketched out more in the beginning. Unlike most real-life projects, the author had a chance to do it right from the beginning. This would have been a valuable lesson on project design.
4. Absence of Design Patterns
This may be a bit more advanced, but should have been mentioned.
5. Too Fat
Like most other Wrox books, they are way too fat. This could have been trimmed down a lot. I, like most developers, do not have time to read books of 700 pages or more. I need to read a lot of books so I need the fat trimmed a bit.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wanna be good?, January 18, 2000
Great is not enough! Wrox did it again. If you want to do n-tier architecture, don't go further except if you want to get the Professional Visual Basic 6 Distributed Objects from the same author.You can get into a more *real-life* programming examples with this book and ALL exemples are very well explained. It gets you in every twist there is to do good OOP with Visual Basic 6. For beginner's to intermediate programmers, you might have some difficulties BUT it's written well enought where you can follow anyway. For experienced programmers, you will probably learn new twists. A must.
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