murali hariharan said
The title of this book should be "How TMS implements VB"
If you're an Intermediate VB programmer who's looking to expand his/her skills, don't buy this book. I learnt this lesson the hard way.
This book is not really an Advanced book. Its really a super-advanced book with many special and arcane topics. There is good technical info at times but it is few and far in between. The book rambles along aimlessly. There is little explanation as to how one topic relates to another.
The authors are knowledgable in their fields but extremely conceited. They also try to be witty all the time. Gets tedious after a while. There are too few examples and too much prose.
Anonymous said
More of a 'Special Topics' book. Don't expect to run through an introductory book and right into this one. Though the first chapter has some useful suggestions for handling bugs.
Anonymous said
One of the few books I've bought that I'll probably not refer back to again. This book needed a strong editor to turn competent programmers into good writers. The book rambled aimlessly, not really giving a hint as to where they were going or why one piece of info related to another. I know we all need our 15 minutes of fame, but each chapter's autobiographical data was a little over the top.
Anonymous said
There are unrelated and unorganized chapters written by different authors. The book is actually about "software development". The authors express their experience. Also titles are so funny some examples :"Here Be Dragons","Dancing in Step","Using Smoke and mirors" etc.I am sorry that I bought this book.
Vincent O'Sullivan said
This book is written by people who generally know what they are talking about and there is a lot of good stuff in there. However, like all books with multiple authors, some chapters are better than others and some just plain irrelevant.
The error handling chapter is probably the best. The "Programming with Variants" chapter is the most interesting but, if followed through, is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. The "Minutae" chapter is also interesting but of no practical use. The chapter on Business Objects was the most dissapointing. It appears to have a lot of good stuff in it but falls dreadfully short on how to implement its theories. "How to recruit" was cetainly the most irrelevant chapter in a how to write code book. I guess it was there because it's a subject close to the author's (Mr Mandelbrot's) heart.
The book's biggest strength is its 'different viewpoint' to most other VB books. It's biggest weakness is that VB is rapidly heading for the history books. Despite its many shortcomings Java is now where it's at. Sorry.
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