Rating: 
Summary: One of the best investments I've made.
Review: This book saved my life. Well, not my life, but almost two months of data entry. This book showed me how to automate an extremely simple yet repetitive set of key strokes that would have taken weeks to complete. Definitely worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: It can do all of that
Review: This is a mind-opening book. I found out that with WindowsScript Host you can add code from other programs on your system toyour script, alter your Windows environment using Windows API calls, use the full Visual Basic syntax via the Visual Basic control creation edition, access databases using the ADO interface and all this is free for the download from Microsoft.There is another free download not mentioned in the book, the OLE viewer at Microsoft that allows you to view all of the type libraries and COM objects on your system (and it's a good idea to first download and run regclean, a registry cleanup utility, another free download from Microsoft). Too bad the script debugger and windows output requires Internet Explorer (free download from Microsoft), so if like me you use Netscape at work, you're out of luck. I had to modify the scripts to output an html file instead of an html screen. There's a CD that has the text of the book in searchable Acrobat format plus all of the scripts and Visual Basic source code. For the second edition, maybe the pages about finding out the scriptable objects and type libraries could be replaced by mentioning the free ole viewer and stuff about XML and WMI could be added, but you can't have everything! END
Rating:
Summary: It can do all of that
Review: This is a mind-opening book. I found out that with WindowsScript Host you can add code from other programs on your system toyour script, alter your Windows environment using Windows API calls, use the full Visual Basic syntax via the Visual Basic control creation edition, access databases using the ADO interface and all this is free for the download from Microsoft. There is another free download not mentioned in the book, the OLE viewer at Microsoft that allows you to view all of the type libraries and COM objects on your system (and it's a good idea to first download and run regclean, a registry cleanup utility, another free download from Microsoft). Too bad the script debugger and windows output requires Internet Explorer (free download from Microsoft), so if like me you use Netscape at work, you're out of luck. I had to modify the scripts to output an html file instead of an html screen. There's a CD that has the text of the book in searchable Acrobat format plus all of the scripts and Visual Basic source code. For the second edition, maybe the pages about finding out the scriptable objects and type libraries could be replaced by mentioning the free ole viewer and stuff about XML and WMI could be added, but you can't have everything! END
Rating:
Summary: A Dangerous Book
Review: This is truly a fantastic book. If you want to learn the guts of Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and how to do some super stuff, this is the book for you. Dr Weltner teaches you how to access objects from VB Script, including COM objects and internal Windows objects. He shows how to get object documentation directly out of your system (this is the same stuff that Visual Studio displays when you point to a specific command). And, this is great, he shows you how you can access the internal objects in Internet Explorer and use it for output displays. Every example is on the CD. He has also worked hard to provide a lot of objects that extend the functionality of the inherent Windows commands. The VB source code is available or you can directly install the COM objects he supplies. The writing is straight-forward - the first chapters really get into it and then he expands topics as he goes along. The index is great and quite large and it's pretty easy to find things. Until I read this book, I thought VB Script was VB without any claws. It seemed like such a useless language. Read this book and find out how to put VB Script on steroids - you can access EVERYTHING in Windows with it. Do NOT buy this book if you want to learn VB Script - get one of the 21 day or 24 hour books for that. Then read this book. This is a dangerous book - the knowledge in will give you internal knowledge of Windows as well as introduce you to the object world quickly.
Rating:
Summary: A Dangerous Book
Review: This is truly a fantastic book. If you want to learn the guts of Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and how to do some super stuff, this is the book for you. Dr Weltner teaches you how to access objects from VB Script, including COM objects and internal Windows objects. He shows how to get object documentation directly out of your system (this is the same stuff that Visual Studio displays when you point to a specific command). And, this is great, he shows you how you can access the internal objects in Internet Explorer and use it for output displays. Every example is on the CD. He has also worked hard to provide a lot of objects that extend the functionality of the inherent Windows commands. The VB source code is available or you can directly install the COM objects he supplies. The writing is straight-forward - the first chapters really get into it and then he expands topics as he goes along. The index is great and quite large and it's pretty easy to find things. Until I read this book, I thought VB Script was VB without any claws. It seemed like such a useless language. Read this book and find out how to put VB Script on steroids - you can access EVERYTHING in Windows with it. Do NOT buy this book if you want to learn VB Script - get one of the 21 day or 24 hour books for that. Then read this book. This is a dangerous book - the knowledge in will give you internal knowledge of Windows as well as introduce you to the object world quickly.
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