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Summary: Shallow and General Treatment
Review: I looked at this book as something specializing in VB standards. What I got was a thin rehash of some of the highlights from Code Complete and Writing Solid Code. There was some VB specific content, but it was shallow.If you are a serious developer, this book offers little. If you are among the multitude who "grew up" in VB and its all you know, then this book will be an awakening.
Rating:
Summary: Shallow and General Treatment
Review: I looked at this book as something specializing in VB standards. What I got was a thin rehash of some of the highlights from Code Complete and Writing Solid Code. There was some VB specific content, but it was shallow. If you are a serious developer, this book offers little. If you are among the multitude who "grew up" in VB and its all you know, then this book will be an awakening.
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Summary: This book does much more than help you write clearer code
Review: I've read a lot of programming books, and I have to say that this one was definately the easiest to read, and it provided a lot of valuable information. In addition to providing useful information about coding standards for Visual Basic, this book also has a chapter on source code control and implementing Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. I can honestly say that this single chapter was instrumental in the successful implementation of SourceSafe for my company.
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Summary: Nice start on developing standards for your VB Code
Review: If you have come here looking for a book on how to code VB, look elsewhere. If instead, you are looking to develop maintainable code amongst all the developers in your organization, you have come to the right place. In the present development world we often code for performance at the expense of all other aspects of development (maintainability, scalability, etc.). A good set of standards will take you far down the path to maintainable code and poor maintainability is often more expensive to an organization (at least in the long run) than poor performance. We have taken many of the standards here and altered them to the style of the majority of our programmers. By using internally developed VB templates, we have decreased development time without sacrificing quality. This is not fully attributable to this book alone, but the new focus on standards has certainly played a role. If you are serious about developing in a team environment, you will want to develop organizational standards for your team. It will save your company time and money and make it easier for your development team to communicate.
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Summary: Every Visual Basic Developer NEEDS This Book
Review: James' presentation of the material and solid examples of the subject matter are worth many times the retail price of this book. Any devloper who works with a team of developers will see results and value in implementing even just a few of James' suggestions. Even if a developer is not in a team environment, implementing standards will allow the code to be easier to understand to others or to the same person in the future when changes will need to be made. I wish more developers would follow the suggestion of the book to take steps to increase the readability and maintainability of their code. Being in a position where I have inherited numerous projects from numerous developers, i can only dream of the hours I would have saved had their code been formatted in a similar fashion, and using a standard for variable names would have been like winning the lottery! This book is a great foundation and starting point for the Visual Basic Developer (new to programming or with experience) to begin to implement Code Standards and increase the readability and maintainability of their code. I cannot express eloquently enough the relief I felt in finding a standards book aimed solely at Visual Basic since most standards books are aimed at C/C++. I highly recommend this book to every Visual Basic Developer and believe that every developer should keep this book within reach at all times in their developing environment. A sincere thank-you to Mr. Foxall for taking the time to do what we all *know* needs to be done in standardizing our code and releasing his findings to us in such a well-designed format and proving his assertions with real code blocks to show the incorrect vs. a more correct way of accomplishing the task. If you are a Visual Basic programmer, you *NEED* this book. The e-version of the book on the included CD-ROM is just awesome and makes this book even more useful since you can have an electronic copy at your disposal when you need it.
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Summary: A great book for anyone using VB professionally
Review: Many VB developers are used to writing the code anyway they please, however, when you or anyone else needs to debug your applications couple of weeks later, it's harder to understand what is going on in the code unless you follow some standards. This book tells you what standards you should follow, offers examples, explanations, and reasons. Get it, because you will learn something, regardless of the version of VB you are currently using.
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Summary: Good for beginer to intermediate VB developers
Review: Recently I need to draft a VB code standard for my colleagues and this book comes in handy. Most advise in the book is nothing new, every good developer should have already heard of it (whether they adopt it is a different issue). As another reviewer has mentioned, the suggestion that ByRef is only used for parameters you physically modified is the worst of all his advise. The aim of all these practice is to avoid un-maintainable and sloppy codes, this "advise" unfortunately just promotes it. I recommend explicitly declare ByRef/ByVal for all parameters. Another advise I don't agree is the one exit point per procedure. Perhaps my experience in C/C++ and Object Pascal is always okay with exiting in the middle of a procedure. I find the multiple labels too busy and non-intuitive. For invalid parameters, I would rather raise an exception and let the caller due with the problem (s/he deserves it for passing junk to the procedure.) The use '* to begin a comment is also too busy, I would rather just use ' and a space. If you are a beginner to intermediate VB developer, I encourage you to read it. However don't treat the book as a bible, use your own judgement as you progress. The best book I found for writing good solid code is still Steve McConnell's Code Complete.
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Summary: Finally! This book is long overdue...
Review: Thank you thank you thank you! As a person in charge of 5 programmers, I can tell you that managing code of 5 people sometimes feels like I'm managing 5 different projects in 5 different languages. Mr. Foxall has put together a book that will now allow code to be written consistently and efficiently. Now, if someone quits, it will be so much easier to have someone else take over their code. That isn't to say that it's going to be easy to get our older code up to using these standards. Actually, it will take a bit of work (we should have been doing these things all along, but never knew exactly what to do). I'm going to get a copy for all of our developers. Kudos!
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Summary: Destined to be a classic!
Review: The author has obviously written Visual Basic code for a living. His work has a definate 'been there' feel to it. He offers practical advice on writing better code and creating better user-interfaces. I found the chapter on architecting modules and procedures particularly helpful. While most books don't lend themselves well to an on-line format, this book's on-line format on the CD is exceptional in that it makes it easy to reference the material - which you'll want to do often. I keep mine with my staples: Code Complete and Dan Appleman's Guide to the API. b
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Summary: A Must Read for all levels of Visual Basic Programmers
Review: There are some books you wish every VB programmer would read, this is one of them. I used this book as a helpful reference to develop programming standards for two developer groups. I did not agree with all the standards in the book. I felt that some of them were not actually the standards followed in the industry, but most were well laid out and if followed would improve the VB programming industry. Some areas were covered more indepth than others and those that were not covered so well probably should have just been left out. (Source Safe, Error Handling [get an error handling book]) All-in-all a very good book and I don't believe there is a better VB standards book on the market today.
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