Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Good
Review: The first third of the book deals with subjects covered in other WROX publications. The treatment here is cursory, but enough to be usefull. However, once the code is covered things get messy. Properties are all named with Get (not good practice) and several properties should be coded as methods, for which the authors seem to have little use. ADO should get more attention, but the authors just go ahead and hard code database connections. The same parameters are sometimes treated as variants, then strings or integers. The stored procedures for the T-SQL database were all named with an sp_ prefix (which is a no-no), and so on... On the whole it's a usefull book, once you clean up the authors' mess.
Rating: 
Summary: Deserves more than 5 stars
Review: The target audience for this book is someone with some VB/VBA/VBScript experience who is looking to expand into serious VB development, and has possihly been put off by more advanced and detail oriented books. The writing style is casual but not cute. Concepts are presented first from a big picture view followed by more detailed explanations and code. A single main project is woven through the book with numerous additional short examples for introduction of new topics. Examples are kept to just the point being explained and contain numerous screen shots. The introduction to COM is outstanding and of correct depth for the intended audience. Although there were 3 principal writers, the book speaks with one voice and one writing style. It is, I believe, an outstanding choice to follow completion of a book like Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6.Bruce Kirkpatrick MCDBA, MCSD, MCSE+I, MCT, i-Net+, Network+, A+
Rating:
Summary: Brian
Review: This book is aimed towards the Visual Basic Developer who has a handle on the langauge itself and now would like to advance thier knowledge and see how to use VB in the large scales solutions approach. This book holds some great material showing you how to complete the end result using a step by step approach. An online banking system is just one of the topics and through this process everything is broken down very nicely into manageable steps. Technologies covered include UML, VB coding, the MS Solutions framework, MTS, ASP, XML and SQL Server. Each technology is explained through explanation and code illustration, clearly demonstrating how they tie together and may be distributed over a windows environment. To get the most out of this book Either Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 to be Operating System, Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 (Desktop Version). So if your looking to advance your skills and overcome some challenging tasks then this Book would do justice to your resume and future.
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