Rating: Summary: Dips you in the VBscript pond & more (keyword dip) Review: A useful book for me, introducing me into VBScript quite well, but it will make you more of a 'Jack of all trades & master of none'. Each chapter gives you a dip into VBscript, HTAs, HTCs, ASP, and a whole bunch of other things I never knew about! Not a bad way to embroil ones-self into these technologies but not terribly in-depth. MSDN's site gave me more beefy examples I could use for my scripting needs. The reference section was OK at best. If you need a good warmup on VBscript and where it can live & do it's things, not a bad book.
Rating: Summary: Dips you in the VBscript pond & more (keyword dip) Review: A useful book for me, introducing me into VBScript quite well, but it will make you more of a 'Jack of all trades & master of none'. Each chapter gives you a dip into VBscript, HTAs, HTCs, ASP, and a whole bunch of other things I never knew about! Not a bad way to embroil ones-self into these technologies but not terribly in-depth. MSDN's site gave me more beefy examples I could use for my scripting needs. The reference section was OK at best. If you need a good warmup on VBscript and where it can live & do it's things, not a bad book.
Rating: Summary: The Best VBScript Book Review: Although there are many books on scripting, there are only a handful of books about VBScript. Of those that do focus on VBScript, many pages are devoted to server-side web scripting with active server pages, which is amply covered by the many titles on ASP. This book by contrast is current, complete, and packed with chapters about all the cool things you can do with VBScript, including COM objects and how to write your own, regular expressions, HTML applications (*very* cool), ADO, how to build the Script Control into your applications, and yes, ASP. That's the first 500 pages. The remaining 280+ pages are references and appendices that add depth. I have seen no other reference in print or online from Microsoft that goes to these lengths to elucidate what can be done with VBScript. The writing style is very approachable, and the Wrox Press model of a team of qualified people tackling different topics works very well (11 authors and 7 technical reviewers). These people really know the topics, and the book is well edited. An excellent value.
Rating: Summary: Where was the editor? Review: As another reviewer has noted, any book that has eleven authors is bound to need a good editor, but this one shows no sign of even having been looked at by a copy editor. Many sentences don't make any sense at all, the cringe-inducing substitution of "it's" for "its" occurs all too often, the first person singular appears inexplicably (who is "I"?), and some of the code samples contain obvious bugs. On the positive side, there is a lot of information in the book, but the lack of attention to the text makes one wonder about the quality of the information as well.
Rating: Summary: Poorly Organized Review: As informative as the authors try to be, trying to find any desired topic, in this book, is virtually impossible. The index is imcomplete. The examples are okay, but the book could be organized better. Too bad I couldn't recommend a better book. To be efficient, take the time to browse through the book and use small bookmarks to highlight the important sections. Personally, I've learned more and have been more productive with a good book on ASP.
Rating: Summary: No Functions or Subs! Review: Bought this book 'cause I wanted a VBScript language reference and it sounded good. Like the presentation of the language - except the HUGE omission of not covering functions or subs. This appears to be an editing mistake, as one of the chapters mentions it is covered in Chapter 3 even though it isn't.
Rating: Summary: Great for a beginner looking for everything. Review: Haven't finished this book yet but after reading a few chapters and skimming through the rest this was the perfect book for me. My level of programming is quite small - minor programming in highschool and graduate school with old languages (e.g., fortran77). The book picks up with things I knew but kind of wanted to reread again (dimensioning, basic functions, etc.). I can see someone familiar with this type of language not liking this book so much. But the book does seem to go into very great detail about more advanced topics later on.
Rating: Summary: I use this book almost everyday! Review: I am a ASP web developer and I find myself refering to this book more than any other that I own. I especially like the way the appendixes are layed out. This is also the most borrowed book on my shelf at work.
Rating: Summary: VBScript Programmer's Reference Review: I am not normally a fan of multi-author text books. Unless they are very carefully edited, you wind up getting beat up with words, hearing 3 or 4 different renditions of the same material. But I found "VBScript Programmer's Reference to be a useful book. I appreciated the section on Remote Scripting, which I put to good use in an intranet (MSIE5) web development project. Anyone getting started in web development will find a maze of rapidly emerging software technologies to sort through. I encountered two problems that I simply did not know how to address. So I e-mailed a few of the authors of the text, hoping to get a reply. To my surprise and delight, each one responded to my request and got me moving forward! I know that WROX cannot promise this kind of followup from all authors for all of its texts, but the folks who wrote VBScript are good guys who want to help. For the book and the remarkable followup they deserve at least 5-stars.
Rating: Summary: Good if ASP and COM are in your future otherwise....... Review: I bought this book as a first timer to VBScript, but it just didn't clearly explain much of what I was looking for in a book titled VBScript. It didn't provide very good code examples and fewer explainations about the built in functions of VBScript. It gave an insight to VBScript's use with ASP and COM, but it neglected areas it needed to clearify better. It covered a lot of extras and not the meat of VBScript so I had to turn to other books for clear explanations and good code examples. If I hadn't had a college instructor this book would have been of little help as a sole resource to VBScript.
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