Rating: 
Summary: The title lies!
Review: Carl Franklin has significant credentials and I expected to see a full description of WebClasses and other VB6-specific features in this book. What's there instead is a sloppy update of his VB4 book and poor to non-existent coverage of the power new features VB6 provides. Carl has gone the way of other authors who make minor changes to existing content with each new VB release. Because VB6 adds so much to internet programming that wasn't there before, this approach borders on being dishonest. Shame on you, Carl!
Rating: 
Summary: Carl Franklin has really hit the mark with this one
Review: Carl Franklin shows you how to write VB programs that implement the most important Internet protocols, including Usenet News (NNTP), E-mail (SMTP and POP3), file transfer (FTP), the Web (HTTP) and more. This book includes many example programs using both the Winsock control (shipped with VB) and a third-party socket control from Dolphin Systems. To cap it off Carl provides a whole suite of objects of his own design that encapsulate each of the major Internet protocols. These objects hide all the complexity, making Internet programming with VB a lot of fun. This alone is easily worth the price of the book.Given the importance of the Internet, this book is a must-have for any serious VB programmer.
Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners to intermediate VB programmers!
Review: Carl Franklin, the VB word's Internet guru has released his newly revised book on the Internet titled Visual Basic 6.0 Internet Programming. Carl, has been using and writing about Internet programming before most programmers even knew what it was. He speaks on it at VBITS, writes articles about it in the Visual Basic Programmers Journal and even has written the coolest Internet based training program around, called WorldTrain. So this book is the sum of his many years programming with Visual Basic for the Internet. This book is great because you can sit down and read it from cover to cover and learn a ton of information on the Internet. It can also be used as a reference while you are programming. The appendices contain full listings of the protocols that Carl writes about. The book is also really easy reading. If you are just getting into Internet programming, it's very easy to follow. Carl makes it all very easy to understand without letting it get bogged down with so much technical stuff that might just end up being confusing. The book is also packed full of sample code to get your projects up and running very quickly. He even wraps much of the code into Classes that you can just load into your project and go to town! The book starts off by explaining just what all these Internet buzz words are. Like TCP/IP, Ports, Name Resolution and Sockets. It's been a while since I have done Internet programming, so this was a nice refresher for me. He then starts explaining Winsock and what it means to us. This is the core of what we use to communicate with the Internet. For most of the book, Carl uses Dolphin Systems' dsSocket ActiveX control to provide a layer between VB and the Winsock API. Even though this is a third-party control, it's much easier to use than going straight to the API. I have been using this control as long as Carl has and I have never found a problem with it. If Carl had to teach you how to program straight to the Winsock API, the book would have been three times as thick and just as much more difficult to understand. There is a Microsoft Winsock control also, but he does not recommend using it. The book then teaches you about all you can do on the Internet in a chapter by chapter method. It starts off talking about NTP (Network Time Protocol), WHOIS and Finger. The next chapter dives into USENET news services and it's related protocols. Here, you learn how to connect to NNTP servers to read and post articles. Chapter 5 delves into Electronic Mail. Carl explains and shows how to send and receive mail and files using the SMTP and POP3 protocols. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to retrieve and send mail from mail servers. It's not as hard as you might think. It even shows you how to UU encode and decode files (you can't send binary files directly with mail). The next chapter shows you how to FTP files to and from servers. The next chapter is on the World Wide Web. Here Carl shows you how to read web pages and access html Forms. In chapter 9, Carl shows you how to use his CFInternet objects. Carl has wrapped up most of the code you will ever need into VB COM DLL. It contains the code from Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 so you can easily use it in your application and get your project working very quickly... hours even! He even provides the code for this DLL so you can make any changes you wish to it. In the last chapter, Carl teaches you how to write Client/Server applications. This is the most useful chapter because it gets into exactly what you need for your project to work. Again, he provides tons of information, code and even a DLL to get you up and running quickly. This chapter even has inspired me to maybe suggest the same type of new architecture for the Client/Server application I help develop where I work... so maybe we can dump DCOM and come up with a better solution using the Internet... we'll see. In the appendices, Carl lists complete command listings for the NNTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP protocols. The CD-ROM that comes with the book has tons of free code, the Dolphin Systems' dsSocket control, Internet Protocol Documentation and even a song recorded by Carl! So in conclusion, if you are using VB to program to the Internet, then this is the book for you! You won't be sorry by adding this book to your collection.
Rating:
Summary: Long History of Good Information
Review: Carl has a long and excellent history of providing useful information to VB programmers who want to exploit the Internet for custom applications. This book continues that tradition by helping VB developers truly understand the underlying protocols used on the net. If you want to create applications that use these protocols, this is your book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Source of Internet Programming Material
Review: Coming from an AS400 world, I've used most of the examples and applied them to AS400 TCP/IP server applications - FTP, POP3, and sockets stuff to name a few. Even though the book does talk about the dsSock control, it looks very familar to the winsock control and I was able to relate to it. Also, great section on ASP for dynamic web pages. The tons and tons of sample code throughout the book helped me out tremendously. Well done Carl.
Rating:
Summary: Dissappointing to say the Least
Review: Despite the considerable credentials of the author, this book provides very little useful information. All too often it seems, every code example used, every discussion broached evolves around a separate plug in. I certainly didn't expect a 400 page advertisement. Neither should you.
Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book, Buggy Code Samples
Review: For an introduction to Internet programming techniques, this book is too narrowly focussed. It only covers and implements a proprietary Internet control completely ignoring Wininet and Winsock. On top of this the code samples are extremely buggy and are not supported by the author's VB website! Avoid at this price, might be useful at bargain basement prices only as alearning exercise in debugging terrible code.
Rating:
Summary: The best VB Winsock book...
Review: Hey Carl, I must say you have done a great job with this book. Your explaination is short and simple to understand, unlike many other books which take pages and pages and still you don't understand what the author is trying to explain. Keep it up, Carl!
Rating:
Summary: I thought the book was great!!
Review: I always heard alot about Winsock programming but never got the big picture until I read Gary Frankin's book. If I wanted to write Winsock applications from scratch, and had a lot of time to work on it, I might trying writing them using Windows API's... But, I don't want to make a career out of Winsock programming. My primary goal was to have two computers communicate over a facilities Ethernet network. This book showed me how to do that. I can even do it over the Internet now. I think that's great stuff. So, yes, Gary does teach the use of a third party ocx: dsSocket TCP/IP Custom Control by Dolphin Systems at a cost of $99 http://www.dolphinsys.com/dssocket.htm . But there are others equally expensive: Socket/x by Mabry Software at a cost of $179. https://www.mabry.com/socketx/index.htm . As a programmer, if using a third party ocx saves me 3 hours of programming time, it's worth it... And, these ocx's will save you more time than that. This book isn't about ASP & website programming like so many others are, here you'll learn how to get computers to communicate on networks. I recommend this book if this is what you are looking for...
Rating:
Summary: I thought the book was great!!
Review: I always heard alot about Winsock programming but never got the big picture until I read Gary Frankin's book. If I wanted to write Winsock applications from scratch, and had a lot of time to work on it, I might trying writing them using Windows API's... But, I don't want to make a career out of Winsock programming. My primary goal was to have two computers communicate over a facilities Ethernet network. This book showed me how to do that. I can even do it over the Internet now. I think that's great stuff. So, yes, Gary does teach the use of a third party ocx: dsSocket TCP/IP Custom Control by Dolphin Systems at a cost of $99 http://www.dolphinsys.com/dssocket.htm . But there are others equally expensive: Socket/x by Mabry Software at a cost of $179. https://www.mabry.com/socketx/index.htm . As a programmer, if using a third party ocx saves me 3 hours of programming time, it's worth it... And, these ocx's will save you more time than that. This book isn't about ASP & website programming like so many others are, here you'll learn how to get computers to communicate on networks. I recommend this book if this is what you are looking for...
| 
