Ole Db and Odbc Developer's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Less detail than it claims
Review: Before I say too much bad about the book, it should be pointed out that this is one of the only books published on OLE DB right now and the information it had to go on to write the book(Mircosoft Documentation) is a horrible mess and still in it's beginnings, the book is not completely to blame for its shortcomings. However, a book that sticks to fundamentals is always good and this book fails to do that. First off, half the book is about ODBC which is a dead subject now days if you plan on staying current with microsoft technology. Secondly, the chapters on using MFC and ATL to develop consumers are basically a walk through of meaningless details that are never explained except in the most particular cases. I would have liked to see a *general* overview of the Consumer templates classes as well as the OLE DB interfaces themselves rather than develop a dialog box.

Another thing disappointing about the online documentation and this book is that no where does it explain how to handle stored procedures. Ultimately I had to discover the use of dynamic accessors and multiple result sets in this situation myself.

My suggestion is to wait until after the holidays when the better books are going to come out.

Rating:
Summary: Great ADO and ATL examples
Review: Book does a great job giving you examples so you can get your application to work. Use this book along with other books that go deeper into the ADO APIs. I found that the examples worked as written in the book. I was able to modify them to meet the needs of my application and database so i could quickly get started.

Rating:
Summary: Yes, the examples don't work
Review: I agree with Mr Harteveld. I typed in one example (OLEDBDepartmentATL its called, chapter 9). Typed in to better understand. First it didn't compile, then vars hadn't been initialised - several lines are omitted from book. Once working it almost but not quite works.
I copied it from CD and built it unchanged. It still doesn't quite work. It nexts thru the DB ok but once you Add a rec then you keep getting error HRESULT = -2147467259 when you next, first, last, prev, ... error is way down in the atl template.
This book is easy to follow as far as it goes (which is not far). Nallet's is better but very unclear. I haven't found a good book on OLEDB yet.

Rating:
Summary: the best authority for OLEDB with VC++
Review: Instead of using ADO in VC++ , I am totally convinced about using OLEDB after reading this book. The whole thing finally make sense. The content is easy to understand and instructional steps with concise codes to follow. It's really worth the money. I hope Chuck can update this volume now that .NET has arrived, especially with regard to XML. We still need OLEDB for VC++ version 7.

Rating:
Summary: At Last a real Database Visual c++ Book
Review: This book it just wonderful , I been programming Database since 1994 and I never found a real book in visual c++ that has 668 pages of Visual c++ Database programming (until this book). It covers all the aspect that we need like (vc++ Database programmers ) : running select , delete , update, insert From any technique like DAO (the old one ) DAO and OLE DB and API ODBC He show you and explain you the code and explain you how to use Database Programming using regular VC++ and also ATL ,COM , Web-Based Databases He also show you the OLAP OLE DB Consumers . In general is explain you how to work with the MS-SQL SERVER DATABASE (NOT Oracle or Informix each of them has it won tricks!) those section I found use full for me ,Developing ATL OLE DB Consumers Catching Errors (very imported ) Developing OLE DB Providers , how ever this book focused in the OLE-DB AND SOME API ODBC and not in much in the ADO and DAO .

There is not bla bla bla in this book.

VC++/C++ experience level : You must know to use the VC++ 6 and ( also C++) , and general ATL programming So if you are not experience in those subjects you should learned them before jumping to this book if you already know VC++ but not an ATL so get an ATL book and this book also , I believe after few chapters on the ATL programming you could use this book.

Database experience level :

You should know SQL language and some basic sql-server DBA but realy the basic. HOW EERVER if you never wrote any ODBC /DATABSE software befor and you don't know what is recordset or execute , learn this topic in visual basic database programming befor reading this book in vc++.

English level : The English level here is understandable to also that not an English speakers.

Rating:
Summary: The best of a bad bunch
Review: This isn't a great book, but when you look at what else is out there, you start to wonder if anyone could do any better than this.

As the earlier reviews mention, this book is short on details and long on stepping you through the Visual C++ app wizard. There is a lot of unexplained code in the book, most of which is generated by the wizards and sort of just plopped there on the page for you to try and make sense of.

It's also best to know COM and ATL fairly well before starting, because in-depth lessons on either of these subjects aren't to be found here, though in fairness, this book wasn't written for giving beginner lessons in those. The book does do a good job of quickly discussing C++ templates in general, however.

This book's strengths, you ask? Even with the unexplained code, it's a pretty easy read, and Chuck Wood does give decent lessons on how OLE DB and ODBC work and how to create your own appliations using them. He's a good writer, and that kept me going through a lot of tough patches with this thing.

With the awful reviews given nearly every other OLE DB and Visual C++ book, this one starts looking not so bad in comparison. It's not great, and be prepared for some confusion and frustration, but for now, it's the only game in town.

Rating:
Summary: hmmmmmmm.......
Review: When I bought this book I hoped that the writer EXPLAINED something on how OLE DB or ODBC is contrusted, how it should be used, how it shouldn't be used, some diagrams which showed the visual architecture of some configuration, etc, etc.

None of this is in the book!! Mr Wood just managed to give some examples, of which just 50% worked. In an ODBC example he couldn't even manage to create a faultless MoveLast function call. If you still don't get my point, buy the book!

Because he used MFC, which is beginning to die very slowely because of .NET, this info is useless for the future. He also used ATL. As I know ATL pretty well I can assure you that Mr Wood don't! No correct registery entries, no correct semantics, no decent interfaces, etc. etc..

If you know something about C++, like exception-safty, memory management, multythreading or write semanticly correct functions, don't be foold by the other reviews. This book is truly for the beginning developer and not for you! And even for the beginning developer I do not reccoment this book.

I still gave this book 2 stars, why? The first starr because there is a nice appendix about OLE DB properties, error codes and the ODBC API. The second starr because this is one of the only books which showed 'something' about OLE DB providers.

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