Rating:  Summary: Terrible book Review: Before buying this book, I was a little angry about the lack ofquality documentation on using OLE DB and ADO in C++. After buyingthis book, I am STILL angry about the lack of quality documentation on using OLE DB and ADO in C++, AND I'm angry about being out the bucks I spent on it. This book misses the mark on (what I took to be) it's intended audience, badly. Hardly a book for a beginner to learn the subject, it's just a rehash of reference material available elsewhere. Why, oh why, does Amazon not have a rating of 0 stars for these reviews? END
Rating:  Summary: Horrible book - save your money Review: Before buying this book, I was a little angry about the lack ofquality documentation on using OLE DB and ADO in C++. After buyingthis book, I am STILL angry about the lack of quality documentation on using OLE DB and ADO in C++, AND I'm angry about being out the bucks I spent on it. This book misses the mark on (what I took to be) it's intended audience, badly. Hardly a book for a beginner to learn the subject, it's just a rehash of reference material available elsewhere. Why, oh why, does Amazon not have a rating of 0 stars for these reviews? END
Rating:  Summary: Absolutely Awful Review: I can't think of a single positive about this book. Not only does it fail to teach anything about OLE DB development, the code presented simply does not work. (The author, however, claims that it will.) It actually gets worse, though. If you attempt to try to find any sort of updates, as mentioned by website in the book's introduction, you'll find that the relevant webpages don't exist!So, what you get is: -Reference information you can somewhere else (and more cheaply), -Nothing to learn, -Buggy code, and -No way to update it Do NOT buy this book for ANY reason, as the other reviewers have indicated.
Rating:  Summary: Terrible book Review: I just wish I had returned it in time to get my money back.
Rating:  Summary: I concur - Review: I must agree with the first two reviewers that this book is extremely disappointing. The majority of the book is a simple catalog of interfaces and methods. There is absolutely no meaningful analysis or instruction. I too had trouble getting the code to work. And a question to the floor - why in the world would one want an agent in a "simple OLE DB consumer"?
Rating:  Summary: I concur - Review: I must agree with the first two reviewers that this book is extremely disappointing. The majority of the book is a simple catalog of interfaces and methods. There is absolutely no meaningful analysis or instruction. I too had trouble getting the code to work. And a question to the floor - why in the world would one want an agent in a "simple OLE DB consumer"?
Rating:  Summary: Possibly the worst tech book ever published. Review: In the book's prerequisite chapter, we receive our Com "hard hat" by understanding that dynamic-link libraries are "the long-desired binary compatibility for applications!" Given that the goal of the book is to teach OleDb, such fortune-cookie interjection probably does not suit the reader. An OleDb and Ado "Primer" consumes two thirds of the book, and is an alphabetically organized incomplete subset of the MS documentation. Incomplete because it was edited, and even that was done poorly; Something useful like a description of IDBSchemaRowset is not included, while the interfaces that are chosen retain Microsoft verbiage that would be useful only to an OleDb provider developer.
New developers should avoid this book because they will need to unlearn what is presented, or simply find the material impassible. Moderately experienced developers will recognize that they are more qualified than the author.
I would recommend studying the MS rowset viewer sample for OleDb. For conceptual preparation I recommend an academic SQL book and early chapters of Rogerson's Inside COM. OleDb is the marriage of the two, and I have yet to find a good book that described the pair as opposed to the two individuals.
Rating:  Summary: Rather look at MSDN files Review: The most important section of 'OLE DB Development with Visual C++' is the Table of Contents - it provides the only notion of structure in an otherwise rambling stream of poorly formatted text. The best part of the book is its cover. Chapters 1 to 5 are Primers, on COM, ATL, MFC, OLE BD and ADO (323 pages in total). If only these chapters were primers, then the book might have succeeded. Only the COM chapter comes even close to a primer. The chapters on ATL and MFC merely step you through the VisualStudio wizards (and haven't we been through this enough?). The OLE DB and ADO primers are so poorly disguised rewrites of the online MSDN documentation, that Microsoft might be warranted to consider action. Do yourself a favor and compare these chapters with the corresponding MSDN entries -- it is scary! Chapters 6 to 9 provide examples on creating OLE DB providers and consumers in ATL and MFC. These examples follow the rote formula of providing a few pages of wizard steps, followed by many pages of source code. The source listings highlight Wallace's code to indicate which code you should add to the wizard's code. The highlighted code is poorly commented, with further cryptic notes like : "Lines 193-239: This code opens the database specified in the Open dialog. It takes care of closing open Recordsets and deleting existing OLE DB consumers first. Notice that it always starts in table display mode." (p490). That's it. That is all you get in this book. The CD supplied with the book contains the examples contained in Chapters 6 to 9 (no examples in the other chapters). A web interface, including all the (unnecessary) FrontPage files, provides a simple user interface to the example files. The CD also contains VisiBroker (in a COM book?) and a directory filled with various zip files and installation executable files. There is no readme or any other form of explanation on these files. There is not a single diagram of any kind in the entire book. Figures are all screen captured wizard dialog boxes. The total number of pages devoted to explanation is probably less than fifty. Clearly, this book was put together in great haste and with little thought about exposition, explaining or teaching. The rear cover reads "OLE DB is the ODBC-compliant standard ....", typical of the poor attention to detail evident in the design and presentation of this book. Only buy this book if you cannot get the ADO and OLE DB reference information from Microsoft MSDN. Don't expect to actually learn anything about OLE DB here, rather visit MSDN for a more detailed and accessible coverage. I have learned my lesson, stick with the well-known authors and major publishers.
Rating:  Summary: Rather look at MSDN files Review: The most important section of 'OLE DB Development with Visual C++' is the Table of Contents - it provides the only notion of structure in an otherwise rambling stream of poorly formatted text. The best part of the book is its cover. Chapters 1 to 5 are Primers, on COM, ATL, MFC, OLE BD and ADO (323 pages in total). If only these chapters were primers, then the book might have succeeded. Only the COM chapter comes even close to a primer. The chapters on ATL and MFC merely step you through the VisualStudio wizards (and haven't we been through this enough?). The OLE DB and ADO primers are so poorly disguised rewrites of the online MSDN documentation, that Microsoft might be warranted to consider action. Do yourself a favor and compare these chapters with the corresponding MSDN entries -- it is scary! Chapters 6 to 9 provide examples on creating OLE DB providers and consumers in ATL and MFC. These examples follow the rote formula of providing a few pages of wizard steps, followed by many pages of source code. The source listings highlight Wallace's code to indicate which code you should add to the wizard's code. The highlighted code is poorly commented, with further cryptic notes like : "Lines 193-239: This code opens the database specified in the Open dialog. It takes care of closing open Recordsets and deleting existing OLE DB consumers first. Notice that it always starts in table display mode." (p490). That's it. That is all you get in this book. The CD supplied with the book contains the examples contained in Chapters 6 to 9 (no examples in the other chapters). A web interface, including all the (unnecessary) FrontPage files, provides a simple user interface to the example files. The CD also contains VisiBroker (in a COM book?) and a directory filled with various zip files and installation executable files. There is no readme or any other form of explanation on these files. There is not a single diagram of any kind in the entire book. Figures are all screen captured wizard dialog boxes. The total number of pages devoted to explanation is probably less than fifty. Clearly, this book was put together in great haste and with little thought about exposition, explaining or teaching. The rear cover reads "OLE DB is the ODBC-compliant standard ....", typical of the poor attention to detail evident in the design and presentation of this book. Only buy this book if you cannot get the ADO and OLE DB reference information from Microsoft MSDN. Don't expect to actually learn anything about OLE DB here, rather visit MSDN for a more detailed and accessible coverage. I have learned my lesson, stick with the well-known authors and major publishers.
Rating:  Summary: Waste of money Review: This book is a real waste of money. Most of it is just a re-print of MSDN OLE-DB interface specifications. Not even a single example or explanation. This is just too bad, since there are no other books currently on the market that cover VC++ OLE-DB development.
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