Microsoft Books

SQL Server Compact Edition is meant for storing data on mobile devices such as Smartphones and PDA's or for inclusion in applications running disconnected on some user's laptop in an isolated environment. This wonderful book written by Prashant Dhingra and Trent Swanson, two Microsoft developers, is a large book about a small topic, SQL Server Compact Edition. The authors take the time to cover every aspect of working with Compact from installing it and working with the tools necessary to building your database, to programming, to synchronization with a central server, to (my favorite topic) tuning and (my least favorite) security. The book's approach is to provide you with plenty of explanations and documentation, but then to focus on step by step instructions so that you can do the things you need to do with this handy tool.
The topics are not limited to the developer's side of the box, but instead spread out to cover installations, maintenance and various methods of synchronizing the data with central sources. All of it is covered in a great deal of depth, making this a very thorough book. They even go so far as to show you how to tune queries and adjust the database structure to optimize performance and enhance integrity. It's a very thorough book.
If you're just getting started with SQL Server Compact, I can recommend this book as a must read. If you need to just support Compact, not necessarily develop on it, this book is also very useful.

The book provides a good overview of SSCE; although I did find quite a bit of repetative content, especially in the introduction and first 2 chapters.
There are heaps of exercises and code examples to assist both the novice and experienced SSCE developer/administrator/windows mobile programmer and covers everything you'll need to know to get your first application running and/or synchronising with SQL Server 2005.
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SQL CE based app uses - VS, SQL Server, .NET, .NET CF, Windows Mobile and SQL CE.The book explain the landscpae and how various pieces fit together.

The developer who want to learn all MS technologies can find it useful as example walkthrough them VS, SQL Server, .NET, ADO.NET, .NET CF, Windows Mobile, IIS Security technologies

Ofcourse must for teams who are developing using SQL CE.

The sheer size of the book was pleasantly surprising considering the subject matter. I was expecting something a lot smaller.

I agree with the other commenter that parts of it are a bit repetitive, but in the author's defense, it's a very fine line between being thorough and being repetitive and it's a lot better to err on the right side. I think he was clearly trying to make sure that newer developers got a firm basis in the technology even if it could be a little much. And, other than the first few chapters, there's nothing even approaching redundant.

The strenght of the book is the depth of examples. Can I say that every single scenario I've ever encountered or can envision was covered? Probably not. Can I say that every scenario that you'd expect to encounter and many advanced ones that you run into rarely are covered - Absolutely. The code is there for all of it and the examples clearly state everything you need to understand about the example. Moreoever, I have not been through every samplem but I've been through a lot of them approaching just about all, and I have yet to find a problem with them.

All in all I think the author did a phenomenal job and although it's a fairly dry (albeit critical) subject matter, the book is never boring. The coverage is always thorough and never leaves you wanting. He did as good of a job as can be done on this subject and his attention to detail is commendable.

If you're interested in doing Sql Ce development, this book is a must have.

This is a great book to get your feet wet with modern VB programming! He includes all of the code right there on the pages with details as to what everything does and what it means. His database is Microsoft Access; SQL Server Express or SQL CE would have been better, but they weren't out whenever this book went to print.

I would tell anybody that wants to learn Visual Basic to buy this book. It maybe long but the step by step details make it where you can work at your own pace.I found this book to be very well written for the person who has never used Visual Basic the information is written in each chapter to show how it is applied and builds on each chapter until you have a working project at the end. I hope this review will help in your decision to purchase this book.

Product was as advertized and shipping was as promised. Great value for my money!!

It's a Shelly Cashman book, what do you expect, basically it's the same as all the other shelly cashman books, very indepth with good lessons and projects..enjoy!

As an experienced C++ programmer, I wanted to try C# out of curiosity. Obviously, I didn't want to read long-winded explanations of the most basic programming constructs -- I just wanted syntax and effective ways to use it. This book fulfills this purpose well. Within a few days, I was able to start writing real, useful C# applications. And, since I'm a game developer, I was able to find Managed DirectX tutorials and I've already written the fundamentals of a C# game engine!

So, if you know how to code, this book will show you how to do it in C#. Thanks, Steven Holzner!

This a a very good book for someone who has programming experience. Fundamental concepts are in the book, but they are not belabored. The book quickly gets on with C# and what it takes to create real applications that do something more than say "Hello World".

If this is your first experience with programming, then this book is not for you. If you have done some programming and are moving to C# for the first time, then this book is a great addition to your library.

For any programmer coming over from another language, I really think this book offers the most bang for the buck (and for your time). I'm a VB6 programmer who wasted a lot of time and money on other books that either offer too much hand-holding (next to no code, everything through forms designer) and wasted time on extensive examples building software I'll never use or focused only on console C# applications with no explanation of topics like ADO.NET, winforms, etc. I need to use C# at work and like many programmers, I'm busy and have little time to waste. Yet, I also needed a comprehensive book because the real world of business programming requires the use of data-access technologies (ADO.NET), security, network technologies, etc. This book succeeds on all counts. The coverage is surprisingly comprehensive and details are well fleshed out. Even using ADO.NET in code is covered while many other books only cover using it through form controls in Visual Studio (anyone who writes database-connected applications knows that you really need a high level of control of shaping the data before you can present it). Nothing is dwelled upon for long so be warned that the book does move fast and info is densely packed into each page.

This is a very solid book. It assumes you know the basics of programming like loops, modules and the likes... If you are familiar with any regular programming language (like C, C++, Java, PERL, python, ruby, even shell scripting) then this books is probably your best bet to learn C# quickly.

There is no whole chapters made to get you to write a "for" loop here, you must have programming concepts to really benefit from this book.

As a programmer, I really enjoyed it and was able to get to work quickly on C# programs. If you are totaly new to programming, get another book to get your feet wet before jumping on this one.

I have found this book very easy to understand and very useful. I have learned alot from reading this book. It takes you step by step through all the processes. It is a total and complete over view of Windows 95 done very accurately and put into simplest terms. This is a very excellent book!

This book is thorough and clear. The exercises and practice disk are very helpful. The chapter summaries are useful for reviewing. It is an excellent training book for individuals or to supplement classroom teaching of beginning Windows 95. It is also a good book to have on the shelf for reference. I highly recommend it to my students and my friends.

This book is thorough and clear. The exercises and practice disk are very helpful. The chapter summaries are useful for reviewing. It is an excellent training book for individuals or to supplement classroom teaching of beginning Windows 95. It is also a good book to have on the shelf for reference. I highly recommend it to my students and my friends.

I routinely use this book in the Windows 95 classes that I teach. My students range from rank beginners with their first computer to old timers upgrading their systems from DOS and Windows 3.xx. In the classroom presentation I use examples that are different from the ones in the book. The students are instructed to do the Exercises for the Student in the book as their homework. This, of course, is where the learning really takes place. The most difficult part of the process for the rank beginners is loading the practice files on their computers. I can't tell you how many times students come to the first class and ask, "How do I open those practice files?" Beginners are also somewhat afraid to make the changes in how their computer is set up: video colors and patterns, shortcuts, etc. With a little encouragement, most overcome their fear. I do not find this book is a good reference book. I think that's what makes it a good teaching/learning tool.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Wordperfect user and was trying my best to switch over to Microsoft Word. This book has given me the oomph to stick with it. It is crucial to my home business for me to be somewhat proficient in Word and this book will do it. I love the two-page displays and simple tutorial. Thanks IDG Books.

As a teacher, I am often creating worksheets, homework, and notes to parents on the computer. With this book, I am now able to mail merge, create labels, and make more attractive and professional documents using my computer. I am now adding graphics with ease and my work looks more like the way that I want it to look without all of the extra trouble.

This book is extremely organized. The pictures and step-by-step instructions are easy to follow.

I highly recomment this book to anyone who is not a computer wizard. It will make you look like one.

This good book is too simplified. Layout and generous screen captures are good, but some graphics are too cute. I learned several things from it, but the audience for this book is on par of a "dummies" book. Word beginners could get better value with a book with more tips and advanced features without the fear of getting lost.

As a teacher I am always word processing worksheets, homework, and notes for parents. This book was extremely helpful in teaching me how to mail merge and to create labels. Even things like adding graphics and changing text styles were easily learned through this book. I can now make more attractive, more professional documents with ease. The step-by-step directions and pictures were easy to follow and the book was well organized. I highly recommend this if you are not a computer wizard. It'll help you look like one.

Some examples of documents are in color and others are in black and white. They all look good--professional. I think I can do that too, with the help of this book. Lots of good advice, tips and tricks. Good book!

This book is very easy to use, informative and has lots of good examples. It enables you to get the most out of Publisher 2000. There are many tips and tricks located throughout the book. Easy to read and comprehend.

The book has a lot of examples that showed me different ways to do my newsletter and other designs. I can never think of ideas for making the text and pictures look good together. Plus, the author uses a conversational tone in her writing...it's like she's sitting next to me and telling me what to do. Good book.

I like this book because the author offers a lot of tips and advice about using Publisher and about making documents look good.

This book is a must have for any IT shop that wants to run and monitor Exchange to keep your system running 7x24. The book thoroughly covers all major areas and is a must have for IT Professionals. This is a crucial book for everyday tasks.

Mike has a terrific job of writing a lucid, well thought-out book on managing and monitoring Exchange. Very, very helpful not only for tactical "how-tos", but also for a top-down strategic perspective on this issue. A must-buy!

This book will be a great reference to Exchange 2000 administrators. I had the opportunity to review this book as it was being written, and the owners of this book will have a wealth of information about how to keep their Exchange 2000 servers happily chugging along by following the expert advice that Mike has given in this book. Mike has vast experience with large multi-national companies and his many years in "the business" is very much evident in his writing.

Michael Daugherty's book clearly draws on a wealth of in-the-trenches experience in planning, deploying, managing and monitoring the integrity and efficacy of Exchange environments at some of the largest corporations in the world.

Mike's book provides invaluable, easy-to-understand and most importantly, actionable ideas on how to best manage and monitor key aspects of Exchange 2000. This is an easy-to-understand, extremely clear must read for anyone charged with or interested in, understanding and managing the deployment and day-to-day management of a corporate messaging environment.

Databinding is handled later, and lots of interesting stuff I wasn't knowledgeable about came sooner. Bravo. This is a great book that will always be on my desk! (I'm a professional developer with walls of books by Microsoft on Wrox, primarily.)

This was the 3rd or 4th WinForms book I purchased. The others were good, but they were lacking in detail. This book does a great job in explaining 'under the cover' details. The authors do a good job explaining DataBinding, Controls, GDI+, Form, Menus, Inheritance and much more.
This is more than a resource book. The first half is devoted to getting you up and running with building WinForms apps. The 2nd half is an incredible reference, one I turn to almost daily.

If you plan to use or are using .NET WinForm, please, do yourself a big favor, buy this book and leave it on your desk

The authors appear to go to great length for completeness in a companion reference for programmers creating DotNet Forms, an important new feature of the DotNet frameworks. We have been always looking for a capable web enabled report writer without integrating a third-party product, such as Crystal Reports for the Web. DotNet Forms promises in creating at least simple, yet dynamic, multi-paged reports without a whole lot of work.

DotNet provides for creating dynamic Excel-like forms for ASP.NET html. Additional form paging provides for DB presentation similar to Yahoo and eBay searches, which is a familiar and intuitive format. DotNet provides these DataGrid forms with the DotNet Forms API. The API architecture is listed in the last two-thirds of this book, which is an inch and a half thick.

While the authors claim to include a "very fast-paced" tutorial (p1) in the first third (313 pgs) of the book, the DataGrid portion is a mere 6 pages (p307-312), very steep indeed! I'd highly recommend its combined use with another MS Press book by Dino Esposito (0-7356-1578-0) which devotes about half of his book to DataGrid reports and code examples. Another is Jesse Liberty's O'Reilly book on VB.Net (0-596-00438-9) which has one chapter devoted to ADO.net (34pgs).

The publisher include a MS Visual Studio.Net Add-in on the accompanying CD which has the text of the book as integrated help files, 1.7MB MSI files for VS.Net 2K2 and 2K3. Appears a tad bit small? I have not tested the usefulness of the claimed dynamic integration of the O'Reilly Help files along with MS Help during coding process within VS. It appears that this is the initial product enhancement from this publisher. I wonder if an annotatable PDF file of the book would be more useful; at least this would be in a separate window. This tome was read at a local library.

At a local SQL Server Users Group meeting, a new technology that will embellish on the DataGrid and Forms was discussed and demoed. It is the forthcoming SQL Server 2K Reporting Services that will be a low/no cost add-on for SQL 2000 Server and authoring with a Visual Studio.Net 2003 download. It currently is in beta and will be released in 4Q03. It appears to be XML based and production reports can be rendered for browser, printer, PDF, and TIFF output. What a seemingly great idea.

Overall, this detailed 469-page reference on the DotNet Forms API appears needed for the programmer, although this is probably duplicates what's available on a MSDN subscription CD somewhere. The appendix includes another 69-page API term cross-reference and a 23-page index.

This was the 3rd or 4th WinForms book I purchased. The others were good, but they were lacking in detail. This book does a great job in explaing 'under the cover' details. The authors do a good job explaining DataBinding, Controls, GDI+, Form, Menus, Inheritace and much more.

This is more than a resource book. The first half is devoted to getting you up and running with building WinForms apps. The 2nd half is an incredible reference, one I turn to almost daily.

If you plan to use or are using .NET WinForm, please, do yourself a big favor, buy this book and leave it on your desk.

This book skips the jargon and spells everything out -- Yet has key details for intermediate or advanced readers.

I found this book very informative, a great resource on any IP QoS related topics, including very thorough explanations of how different protocols and parts of theirof came about. It is remarkably comprehensive and free of little typos and inconsistencies that seemed to have become almost a rule, based on my other recent readings.

I highly recommend it for anybody who is working in the IP networking environment.

The book - Networking Quality of Service and Windows Operating Systems provides an in-depth introduction to Quality of Service followed by a set of theoretical applications of QoS mechanisms to network engineering scenarios.

The beginning of the book contains the requisite presentation of QoS queuing mechanisms, and IETF work in both the Integrated and Differentiated Services areas. There is also a good discussion on the issues surrounding policy management in QoS enabled networks.

However this books' primary value (and worth its price alone,) are

1) it's discussion of the Quality of Service implementation on the Microsoft Windows 2000 platform. It is essential for anyone developing and hosting QoS enabled applications on the Windows platform. It provides in-depth discussion of the Windows Generic QoS API, QoS Service provider, as well as the traffic control API, and traffic control components including a great discussion on the internal queuing for QoS enabled applications. In the final chapter, the author covers Microsoft value added services for Quality of Service with a discussion of the Access Control Server (ACS) and Subnet Bandwidth Manager(SBM).

2) the authors' intimate knowledge and vision really show with his introduction of a Quality/Efficiency Product (or Q/E product) for QoS enabled networks. This idea is outlined in chapter two, and further referenced in threads throughout the remaining chapters of the book and provides a measurement tool for determining the efficiency of the network over differing QoS mechanisms. The Q/E product - if automated - would go a long way to providing networks with dynamic tools for near real-time QoS provisioning processes inside the network. The Q/E product could provide the foundation on which policy automation and dynamic resource reconfiguration could take place. The Q/E product for a network could be adjusted when promoting applications into or demoting applications out of the QoS space in a network. The impacts of which would be known to existing network SLA's. Although this idea is in its infancy, it provides food for thought to those doing future network research and development in the area of QoS tools and automation.

I highly recommend this book to Networking Engineers, Application and Network Developers, as well as Network Performance and Management planners.

Over the past year I've read a lot of material regarding QoS. I wish this book was in print when I first started researching QoS! This book is very well written and comprehensive. Not only does it do a excellent job of explaining how QoS is incorporated in Microsoft Windows, it also provides in-depth information regarding all the protocols and mechanisms that make up QoS. This book ties it all together very nicely.

Forget about those 1000-page reference books. Learn by doing ý thatýs what I personally believe in. This excellent book contains many examples that you may encounter in real life. The authors will guide you step-by-step through the assignments in the 12 tutorials. The concepts behind each task are well-explained. If you need more hands-on practice, there are numerous exercises at the end of each chapter. By the time you complete the course, you will be confident and eager to impress your boss with your newly-learnt Excel skills.

What a great book!!

Makes learning MS Excel easy by using excercises as you go.

A good method of learning that also doubles as a great reference tool afterwards.

I can't wait to improve my skills with MS Word by using the New Perspective series.

If you're not a programmer, and you want to learn Excel, skip those fat books full of pictures, and don't waste your money on authors that think you're stupid. This isn't some magic bullet; you still have to do the work. I think, however, that this is a better use for your money than one of those 1000-page wastelands. If you're a self-motivated scrapper, this won't just gather dust while you wait for the recycling truck. Get the comprehensive (expert) edition. After you get through this material, you can find a good reference work.(I'm still looking.)

I had this book for an Advanced Microcomputer Applications class. I found the tutorial style really nice, but I think that you really need to do the additional exercises in the the back of the chapters to really understand the material. I think the material on the use of "solver" and pivot tables were rather well done. I think someone who is trying to teach themselves without a teacher could make good use of this book.