Rating: 
Summary: Inspired, incomplete, imperfect
Review: Even as a non-VB programmer I got some great ideas from this book, such as the implicit pattern for implementing auditable entities and dynamic property lists in SQL Server. The (perhaps too long) introductory material on "farms" (distribution and components) had me yelling "Yes!" out loud. But, I found the organization of the book befuddling at times, and thought some of the methods and advice weren't as universal as they sounded. Look at this as one man's well-refined method for delivering a broad, but not universal, class of applications on the VB/MTS/ASP/SQL Server platform. Was worth my time. Thanks Mr. Moniz!
Rating: 
Summary: Destined to become a classic along with Date, Cobb et al
Review: If you are finally graduating from structured procedural code al la mainframe to the brave new world of servers, objects, clients, and the web etc. you will need some mentors along the way. I suggest you start with Murach's VB6, then move up the ladder with Balena's VB 6 Programming, and when you are ready to hit the big time, get this book. You'll read it and feel you are navigating the treacherous new waters in the safety, and security of a luxury yacht. Happy Cruising !
Rating: 
Summary: Great concepts, poor implementation
Review: In a nutshell Moniz puts forth a great concept, but plan on using your own implementation. Read on for the details. When I first read this book I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I was elated that someone had an architecture that supported just about everything my users were asking for. Then we implemented, or tried to anyway. The code generated by his 'Object Factory' was poorly commented and dismally formated. It uses older ODBC, and improperly uses CreateObject() when the components are supposed to be built to take advantage of MTS. (You must use CreateInstance() to keep your components in the same context) He is also passing whole user-defined objects across process boundaries instead of serializing the data. Incredible performance hit! Still enamored with the concept I converted it to ADO and fixed the MTS errors, thinking that I would just copy this cleaned-up project over and over and edit it to support new objects. Man, was that ever complicated! So, now I'm in my third iteration (and last) of trying to implement this architecture by partitioning the functionality into separate components. In theory, this redisign should work better, and be much simpler than his implementation. (Maybe I'll write a book with my version.) ;^)>
Rating:
Summary: Great concepts, poor implementation
Review: In a nutshell Moniz puts forth a great concept, but plan on using your own implementation. Read on for the details. When I first read this book I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I was elated that someone had an architecture that supported just about everything my users were asking for. Then we implemented, or tried to anyway. The code generated by his 'Object Factory' was poorly commented and dismally formated. It uses older ODBC, and improperly uses CreateObject() when the components are supposed to be built to take advantage of MTS. (You must use CreateInstance() to keep your components in the same context) He is also passing whole user-defined objects across process boundaries instead of serializing the data. Incredible performance hit! Still enamored with the concept I converted it to ADO and fixed the MTS errors, thinking that I would just copy this cleaned-up project over and over and edit it to support new objects. Man, was that ever complicated! So, now I'm in my third iteration (and last) of trying to implement this architecture by partitioning the functionality into separate components. In theory, this redisign should work better, and be much simpler than his implementation. (Maybe I'll write a book with my version.) ;^)>
Rating: 
Summary: Where is an editor when you need one?
Review: There is so much muck covering the gems that the proposed architecture never becomes clear. Too much, "Okay, now I'm going to tell you..." "Next chapter I'm going to tell you..." If this book had a good rewritting and an editor, it could have been a worthwhile effort. Also, the focus is split between how to set the physical architecture (how many computers, etc) and how to write general purpose business objects that in theory could be used by many unrelated departments, and split again into how what essentially is making objects suitable for automatic code generation. This book needs to be split into maybe three refocused books, and needs a chainsaw to chop out the wordiness.
Rating:
Summary: Where is an editor when you need one?
Review: There is so much muck covering the gems that the proposed architecture never becomes clear. Too much, "Okay, now I'm going to tell you..." "Next chapter I'm going to tell you..." If this book had a good rewritting and an editor, it could have been a worthwhile effort. Also, the focus is split between how to set the physical architecture (how many computers, etc) and how to write general purpose business objects that in theory could be used by many unrelated departments, and split again into how what essentially is making objects suitable for automatic code generation. This book needs to be split into maybe three refocused books, and needs a chainsaw to chop out the wordiness.
Rating: 
Summary: 1/2 the story
Review: This book covers comprehensively how to create a system that allows you to add, edit, retrieve, undo changes on a distributed system.
You will need to tread carefully in adopting this systems because nothing is offered to effectively analyse the system. How to do you effectively form queries against the large number of tables generated? OLAP has been fleetingly mentioned as a new book but to date I have not seen any hint of it coming out.
What also is left out is the source code to the code generator the author has created. It would even be worthwhile buying, but you cannot. Therefore you are stuck with what is offered unless you are prepared to spend hours creating your own.
In summary, interesting concepts but you might drown in the complexity of the system
Rating:
Summary: I've down graded my review
Review: This book does teach you to create reusable components. It misses out on the implementation of Business Logic and searching. The further you get along in the book the more you realize you're not really getting the answer to "How do I make a real application now?" It's very frustrating. I am using these principles and objects in a large scale web app and will report back here in a month or two when it's done whether or not I need a new job... :)
Rating:
Summary: Good Book; Wrong Title
Review: This book gives an in-depth look at building reusable, RAD-capable, inheritable data objects. In the process it also shows how to use MS SQL Server as an object database (not a relational one). The greatest failure of this book is the title. It should have been called Enterprise Data Objects and been paired with Wrox's book on Enterprise Business Objects. The current title gives the wrong impression and disappoints people looking for a book on overall application architecture.
Rating:
Summary: Learn & Understand VB Reusable Code
Review: This book is mainly impressive but also, as some other reviewers mentionned, lacking some content. The great thing is that it does go over some quite good VB code example for reusable applications. I would say that about 40-45% of this book is to "learn and understand" how to THINK about reusable component while most of the rest is for the actual VB code that does it (and some leftovers for win32 & web interfaces). Indeed, it takes, at the least, an interesting position on Business Logic where he is mainly putting this logic on the data tier but I could agree that in some cases, it could be beneficial. As a .NET reviewer, I have to take special care about books that I'm now reading on VB6 code. This book can easily be migrated to the VB.NET syntax mainly because it's the thinking of the book rather than the actual code. Most or all of the ideas are available with VB.NET but the code will obviously needs some changes in order to accomodate ADO.NET, COM+ Application (somewhat really different than what we are used to with VB6), and some syntax modifications that came along with VB.NET. Even though there is this "issue" about Business Rules, this book remains an impressive reading about Enterprise Application ARCHITECTURE.
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