Distributed Computing Books

This is one of the best books on OLE DB 1.1 that I have come accross. I wish there was an OLE DB 2.0 version of this book!

This is one of the best treaments of OLE DB and COM that I have read. It provides a complete step-by-step guide to developing OLE DB applications. Simply, it's the best OLE DB/ADO book avilable on the market today!

I use this book frequently when programming. It is not a beginner book for OLE DB. But it does provide excellent examples in many instances of coding.

This was the worst treatment of any computer material I have ever read. This book mostly contained copies of the text directly from the user manuals. The author didn't even bother to read the manuals before hand and copies all the spelling errors and mistypes that appear in the documentation directly into the book. What makes it worse is he introduces more! I would never buy this book, in fact, I think anyone who has should request a refund.

this is the only book I could find on OLE DB besides SDK docs, so for that alone I am happy to have it. I did find his step by step approach to developing an oledb app was very helpful, once I had gathered enough knowledge from other sources about COM & some basic Ole db knowledge. this is a good book if you are an intermediate at com and have a basic familiarity with oledb and of course have a good grasp of c++; it was at that point that I found the book very helpful. But plan on reading other materials first to get your base understanding of com & ole db before benefitting from this book (and it was annoying to see comments stating that memset was allocating memory). This book does fill a good niche though to help you get from a base understanding of ole db to a very strong intermediate level (helped me do that anyway) and it saved me a lot of time making that leap that I couldn't have done without reading this book.

I can see many people getting stuck like I did on the first chapter and I can see many people giving up there. Which is a shame but they really should have given the book to a test audience first, and that "Flash" contents screen looks good but does not really help. What makes things worse is that the publisher/author have not got a help page up. (If you find one please let us know).

The actual idea and mini-project in the book are very good its just the struggle that "newbies" will have getting it up and running. ( I have spent 4 hours so far ). I think if you are very familiar with .NET and IIS etc you will be OK but then these probably are not the people that would want to buy this book.

I would have given the book a 4 but I give it a 3 for lake of care in the user installation "experience".

There seem to be 2 schools of thought on this book! The difference being whether you can get past Chapter 1. I can NOT! and it is not without a lot of time and effort both wasted. Forget the cost. Just value your time.

The text does not match the file names on the CD and make sure you have IIS and SQL server in and working before you even think about buying this book.

You may be able to download chapter 1, if so try it and see how far you get then please let me know. I bought this book because of what it was supposed to do and I am so dissappointed, what is worse is that SAMS completely ignore any eMails.

Ah well, good luck to others.

Alan

from the very first example. How frustrating is that?? this book cost me 40 bucks and bam!! Wish I would have saved the receipt.

The only eseeence of this book is to be able to make the code work and learn from it. I spent hours configuring it and still cannot compile the code. There are errors everywhere. Author has given many steps to configuring the code and database and it is more complicated than it should be. I have downloaded many large examples in past and made them to work in short time. In this case it is never ending. I am still trying but am pretty sure I will not be able to run this application without wasting days which defeats the purpose. In my opinion download free samples from asp.net and other sources. This buy is waste of money and more importantly waste of time.

You can consider this book as a case study, where Hoffman has chosen to show how to develop an example application. This constitutes the backbone of the book. The application touches upon many real life development issues. Like building in security, or hooking the application to a back end database. (Microsoft's SQL Server is used in the book, unsurprisingly.) Enough code is shown for you to use as a jumping off template for your actual needs. Realistically, if you do this with any of the sample code, your code may/will end up far longer and more intricate. For pedagogic clarity, Hoffman introduces just enough complexity in his code to show nontrivial capabilities. But not too much that it obscures the essence. However, you must expect that, for example, your SQL queries will be more involved, and so too your parsing of the returned ResultSets. But, as a programmer, you should know that often with a new, unfamiliar language, all you need is a few functional examples. Like what Hoffman provides.

Plus, if you come from a Java or C++ background, the book should be easy sailing. C# is not that different from Java in syntax. And the use of interfaces, like Java but unlike C++, should be appreciated from the examples.

This book is good if you use it as a reference in your job. If you want to learn PP this is not the book for you. I helped me in a lot of projects. Moreover the functionality in PP has hardly changed from 4.6C.

The book is not so informative who would like to understand the detailed functions of SAP PP module. The book contains no picture or screen shot. It's dealt with various functions but it doesn't seem to be enough.

This is basically a poor rewrite of the on-line SAP documentation. There is nothing to learn from this book. I have found that all of these "Administering" books from Que are waste of paper. Spend you money elsewhere.

The content in this book is not helpful if you know how to use SAP's online help. It is insufficient to provide an understanding of how particular functions in PP module work. In brief, this book is not informative.

As far as I can see these guys have made a big part of job about description of PP customizing and implementation. I am a PP consultant, and I find out a lot of very useful tips concerning this part of SAP R/3. An integration with CO and MM has also been described. So I recomend this issue to any interested in PP people.

This is the most difficult book to follow that I have ever read. it appears to be written and translated from some other language other than english. A complete waste of money.

i want to know for accesing dos versio

It is a software book that came out in 1994. You can't even get the software anymore, so I don't understand that last comment. I happen to have a copy, however, and know that this book is actually quite useful and clear in its application for this database tool. The software vendor and a key partner were bundling the book themselves for a period of time. The writing is clear and to the point. If the previous reviewer thinks it sounds like it was translated from some other language than English, perhaps said reviewer might study some programming languages before attempting to read a book about data base administration with a specific tool. Nuff said.

Some of the chapters are heavily Microsoft biased. I was expecting more of a reference manual so I was disappointed. And even the reference chapters aren't that clearly written--though some are.
For the price, I'd look somewhere else for a BackOffice reference. (P.S. The included CD didn't come with all the books that the cover claimed it came with...)

This book is a great place to start learning about the different products that make up Microsoft Back Office. It is full of Tips that even today (as an MCSE), I find extremely useful

I consider myself lucky that this was clearance priced. . . at my local [computer super-groovy store].

These books are reasonable in content, but they cost far too much to justify their content. I've read other books which cut through the hammy and fluffy text and give me what I need to know. In fact, buying four books on Backoffice ranging from $30 to $50 offers exponentially more information from more diverse sources - and typically come with their own CDs as well. I could care less if they are "Microsoft biased or not" Que has a habit of hyping up products they cover and oddly they cover non-Microsoft products, too.

Lots of padding, and here's one reason why. The TCP/IP section is nice I suppose, but it's not teaching me anything as to how it relates to Backoffice so far. It's going into the history and how the numerology is structured (DNS, subnet mask, et cetera), but if I want to know about TCP/IP protocol theory, lots of books devoted to that [and in greater depth] exist. This book acts as if it wants to be a be-all solution, but has to cut content in some areas to make up for it.

It's no wonder that both books are included on CD in HTML format. I'm hoping that the other reviewer was wrong about his CD not including the goodies for both books. Unfortunately it makes sense as many a company will change a product's content and legally find ways to justify it.

If you're not Richie Rich or Bill Gates, go find and buy up to four books which would effective equal the ridiculous cost of this two-volume set. The Que set is nothing more than a [not quite] cheap attempt to acquire revenue by providing heaps of padding.

Questions+answers are arranged redundantly, information is dated, and there's just not a lot in there. Very amateurish. Bordering absurd. Probably should have given it 1 star when I think about it.

In fact unclear is a better word. I purchased this book as a supliment to "Server+ Certification Bible by Trevor Kay" and yikes!!! First I was mildly disturbed by the fact that the author isn't even Server+ certified. Second the questions are as unclear as Charlie Brown's Teacher in The Peanuts. In my opinion most answers had multiple answers (of which I guessed at what I hoped was the right one) or the questions themselves made no sense at all and being A+, & Network+ certified I would hope that I'm not completely clueless. As a matter of fact the only reason I'm writing this is because I wanted to check this books reveiws before I depended on it for my Server+ exam in a weeks time. Well that's my piece. Good Luck to all and stay away from this book...I hope this helps

The publisher does not hide the fact that this book is just a batch of sample questions and answers related to the Server+ exam. This book might be useful if you've been in the field and have done a lot of work on servers and you want to test you knowledge. However, it is of little use for novices who are trying to learn material for the Server+ exam. The biggest problem with this book is that the CompTIA Server+ exam objectives are not even present in the book. Also watch out for the Exam Watch notes, a high percentage of them are totally wrong. For example: The Exam Watch note that states that only RAID 1 and RAID 5 are fault tolerant (page 25). In fact, RAID 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are all fault tolerant. The book also lacks an index, which makes it difficult to find sample questions on a particular subject.

* Bad index, so I can not use it as a reference book.

* Chapters 1, 2 and 3, whom are they geared to? Not that much useful.

* It is always hard to find answers to simple and basic questions, if exists in the book at all.

* It may be useful to an expert database programmer that is Sybase beginner, as a book to get snippets of information about Sybase. That is on the bases of something better than nothing.

I really liked the book. Most of the Sybase books you see are written for DBA's. This is an excellent guide for the everyday programmer. The author does a great job coving stored procedures and triggers. Very easy to understand and informative. I would give this book 4.8 stars. My only knock on the book is the index. It's a little too small. Overall an excellent book.

The focus of this book is mainly on telling you the names of the parts of Infomaker. While it does have examples of how to use some of the features of Infomaker, they tend to be very basic. If you are looking for information about creating queries, this book isn't for you. The Infomaker 5 documentation is so poor that I did learn some things, but it didn't answer most of my questions.

With out a well-developed back ground in relational databases, I would not have been able to follow the book and tutorials. The tutorials contain errors and misdirection. For instance, the author, in chapter 8, instructs the user to input his/her very first row in a sample table that was just created. When the data is committed to the database, an error occurs because data is missing from a primary table (the primary table must be filled out first). This was one of the many errors I found in the tutorial.

The book is far short of what I experienced a similar tutorial for MS Access published by the MS press.

A reader totally unfamiliar with data warehousing could read this book and come away with a good understanding of the datawarehousing world. The portion that covers the actual Microsoft tools and dialogues is not very detailed, but I guess one could look at a more detailed book for the specifics.

This book is a big waste of time and money. It is lacking the substance and detail needed to understand this important topic. All the book goes into is high level topics and dancing around the substantial issues without handling them.

If you want to really learn about MS OLAP, DTS, MDX, OLE DB for OLAP, ADOMD, etc., then DO NOT buy this book. It will not serve these purposes.

The negative reviews on this book smack of a political witch hunt against the author. This is an excellent starter book for servlets that contains realistic examples that work. Are there some negatives, sure - there are in all books. As a whole, this book is a useful reference and a good read. I have and would recommend it again to folks starting out with Servlets.

Some of example does not have complete source codes. Also, do not expect get any help from author¡¯s forum because almost nobody gets a response from the author since Feb 2000. Good Luck; you really need one!

This book covers less about servlets than you could find in one or two issues of any monthly java periodical, and what it does present is shaky and amatuerish at best. I only wish I had seen these reviews before purchasing it at my local bookstore. What a waste. The author should be held accountable for this garbage, as well as the publisher.

There are plenty of good servlet books. Don't waste your time and effort and money. Too bad the review section doesn't have a rank lower than a "one star". This book is much worse any other book I read that get a "one star".

Most of the reviews are so unreasonably negative that I have decided on 5 stars, although I think 3 1/2 is about right. The examples are not so trivial and are in fact useful. The way each problem is presented is, I think, pretty good. The author covers plenty of popular topics such as online shopping, search engines, chats, RMI and JDBC. I like the way the code is given piece by piece and then finally in its complete form. Why other readers found this approach so awful is a mystery to me. It's certainly far from being a waste of money.