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Rating: 
Summary: An essential reference work
Review: A couple years ago, I developed a commercial application for a major US corporation. The initial spec called for an M18n app; we read everything we could find on the web and still limped in with a nominally i18N app, with plenty of holes to be kludged over. It was basically a matter of "you can't know the answers if you don't know the questions . . .". Having this book available would have saved that corporation thousands of dollars and would have allowed us to produce a much finer product.If your organization has any thought of developing its product for an international market, it would be very foolish to move forward without having this book on hand. Frankly, I can't decipher where some of these other reviews are coming from. I suppose if you have never thought about the subject-matter, a single-session straight-through read might be grueling; myself, I found myself laughing at some things that I had suffered over which Mr Kaplan explained clearly in a few paragraphs, and more than once I was delighted to have anticipated accurately the next section or paragraph - in other words, I felt 'communicated with'. This book is not didactic (except in the original positive sense), self-aggrandizing, millenial (despite its pub. date), or 'cute' - it's a handbook for current and future reference, a programmer-to-programmer communication. Finally, I am very appreciative of the author's attitude that the direction of the communication is as it is not because he is such a clever fellow but because he cares about the subject, had the resources, and did the hard work to assemble accurate (definitive, I believe) information. I wish more programming books were like this.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Book - Quite More Than Internationalization
Review: Microsoft has developed the "Visual Basic 6.0International Package and Deployment Kit" (available online). This tool is mainly to help you localize your VB programs, but that's not enough. Michael Kaplan's book goes beyond that. It detail explains the concepts I resume here: i18N = Internationalization (or Globalization): mainly a program able to manage in any locale the locale language and settings. M18N = Multinationalization: mainly a program able to manage (display and input) several languages in any locale. L10N = Localization: mainly a program able to display its translated and adapted version to several locales. That is not as easy as it should be because of a Code Page Barrier and other problems. The book fully explains everything and gives the right techniques to solve all the problems! Valid techniques for present and future VB releases. It also includes samples and utilities in its CDROM. You can also find up to date information on the book'sWebpage ... Not all the books have its own one!! But that's not all: it also explains how to manage multilingual databases, how to create internationalized webpages and components, gives particular information about languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian,...), and lots of reference material! I haven't found another as complete as this is.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Book - Quite More Than Internationalization
Review: Microsoft has developed the "Visual Basic 6.0International Package and Deployment Kit" (available online). This tool is mainly to help you localize your VB programs, but that's not enough. Michael Kaplan's book goes beyond that. It detail explains the concepts I resume here: i18N = Internationalization (or Globalization): mainly a program able to manage in any locale the locale language and settings. M18N = Multinationalization: mainly a program able to manage (display and input) several languages in any locale. L10N = Localization: mainly a program able to display its translated and adapted version to several locales. That is not as easy as it should be because of a Code Page Barrier and other problems. The book fully explains everything and gives the right techniques to solve all the problems! Valid techniques for present and future VB releases. It also includes samples and utilities in its CDROM. You can also find up to date information on the book'sWebpage ... Not all the books have its own one!! But that's not all: it also explains how to manage multilingual databases, how to create internationalized webpages and components, gives particular information about languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian,...), and lots of reference material! I haven't found another as complete as this is.
Rating: 
Summary: Totally uselesss
Review: My company is going to get some customers in Asia. We are (2 ASP, VB 10-year experience programmers) going to make our products to be able to support Asian language. What we read this book and we found totally nothing help us. Even I would like simply message box a Chinese word instead of ??? in VB application. We also searched many websites and newsgroups that talk about it. Michael and People sometimes introduce this book in the newsgroup. But why people still keep asking such kind of questions, like ???.
Rating:
Summary: Price Didn't Drop Far Enough
Review: The title really sums up how I felt about this book. It was really good in terms of content but suffered a lot due to really uneven editing. I have seen Mr. Kaplan's posts in newsgroups and he tends to type too fast and misspell a lot of words, so I am sure they are "his" typos. But isn't that what editors are for? The overall style is good, though he does tend to ramble as others have mentioned. I preferred the Symmonds book for writing style, but I prefer flash over substance so the message is more important than how it is delivered. Maybe they could write a book together or something? With a publisher than puts more effort into the editing job?
Rating: 
Summary: Not good enough!
Review: This book does give good overview of some basic conceps but is very unclear. I tried to run samples on windows 2000 server machine with all language packs installed but the samples just don't work at all! The book contains more of an overview kind of material rather than how to do an actual application in VB!
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money !
Review: This book provides an approachable guide for the somewhat daunting task of localizing applications written with VB. Code samples provided with the book and on the author's excellent website provide a good foundation for the VB code needed to make your application global. As other reviewers have mentioned, this book describes the process directly with the VB programmer as the intended audience. I think the book also provides a good understanding of locales,lcid, codepages, etc. (whether you are a VB programmer or not) that is critical to successfully implementing globalization. The author does a very good job of providing details of the globalization process from start to finish, not just the intricacies of the code as it relates to Visual Basic. In particular, I have found that it gives the developer a very solid understanding of how VB is handling ANSI and Unicode under the covers, and how to ensure that conversions are accomplished as you intended. I recommend this book as a must have if you are thinking of taking your Visual Basic application to a global audience.
Rating:
Summary: VB conciliation with the world
Review: When I found out that Michael Kaplan was writing a book, I was a little bit scared, not because I thought he lacked the knowledge to do so, like some reviews suggest, but because there would be too much knowledge, and what if I would have problems understanding the issues? Even though most of the articles that I've read from him didn't make me feel that way, but it's different towrite a 600 page book than writing just an article. Even if the book did prove to be very complex, that would not take away from either the value of the content of the book or the ability of the author. Something like that happened to mewhen I first read Dan Appleman API book, and now it's one of my references on the subject, but I had to read many things before I could understood what Dan was trying to accomplish. Good for me that the supposition didn't confirm to be real, and the beginning of the book with the glossary helped a lot on that, because there was in my head a lot of confusion on some of the terms, and that caused some problems reading some articles on this same subject, but with all the explanation up front I felt more comfortable progressing... And then you start reading Part I and you find stuff and problems that you have known about and that you have felt on your day to day basis, and how well they are explained. Plain English that everyone can understand, growing pace on knowledge that the author start introducing without me perceiving the fact. Eventually you realize you are understanding things that you never imagined that you would understand in the first reading, and you do not have to go over it again and again to understand what is being said. When you finish reading a part, you get the feeling that you learned a lot. BIG QUESTION: Why do I think that reading this book is important? The US is a very big country and everyone speaks the same language, they tend to forget that there are other languages in the world, besides English. In Europe where I live the countries are smaller, and they all have different languages and customs. The European Community is opening many markets for developers, because many companies are expanding to other countries in the EC, and the ones that don't follow this trend will surely be crippled. Companies are thinking more and more about having clients in different countries with unique languages and customs. In the same way, the WWW is opening an even more vast market, almost in the same manner. Even if you don't have an immediate need for a international application, it is far better to know what can be done and what are the problems are that you will be facing, and the book will help you perceive this problems. And if you are urgently in need of developing such applications, the book gives hands on solutions, with lots of examples ready to work that will save you a lot of time. This will let you concentrate much more on the application and not so much on the internationalization of it. Please excuse my bad English, Pedro Gil
Rating:
Summary: VB conciliation with the world
Review: When I found out that Michael Kaplan was writing a book, I was a little bit scared, not because I thought he lacked the knowledge to do so, like some reviews suggest, but because there would be too much knowledge, and what if I would have problems understanding the issues? Even though most of the articles that I've read from him didn't make me feel that way, but it's different towrite a 600 page book than writing just an article. Even if the book did prove to be very complex, that would not take away from either the value of the content of the book or the ability of the author. Something like that happened to mewhen I first read Dan Appleman API book, and now it's one of my references on the subject, but I had to read many things before I could understood what Dan was trying to accomplish. Good for me that the supposition didn't confirm to be real, and the beginning of the book with the glossary helped a lot on that, because there was in my head a lot of confusion on some of the terms, and that caused some problems reading some articles on this same subject, but with all the explanation up front I felt more comfortable progressing... And then you start reading Part I and you find stuff and problems that you have known about and that you have felt on your day to day basis, and how well they are explained. Plain English that everyone can understand, growing pace on knowledge that the author start introducing without me perceiving the fact. Eventually you realize you are understanding things that you never imagined that you would understand in the first reading, and you do not have to go over it again and again to understand what is being said. When you finish reading a part, you get the feeling that you learned a lot. BIG QUESTION: Why do I think that reading this book is important? The US is a very big country and everyone speaks the same language, they tend to forget that there are other languages in the world, besides English. In Europe where I live the countries are smaller, and they all have different languages and customs. The European Community is opening many markets for developers, because many companies are expanding to other countries in the EC, and the ones that don't follow this trend will surely be crippled. Companies are thinking more and more about having clients in different countries with unique languages and customs. In the same way, the WWW is opening an even more vast market, almost in the same manner. Even if you don't have an immediate need for a international application, it is far better to know what can be done and what are the problems are that you will be facing, and the book will help you perceive this problems. And if you are urgently in need of developing such applications, the book gives hands on solutions, with lots of examples ready to work that will save you a lot of time. This will let you concentrate much more on the application and not so much on the internationalization of it. Please excuse my bad English, Pedro Gil
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