Rating: 
Summary: one of the Better books
Review: VB6 Business Objects is one of the Greater books. In contrast to so many o-o books that say, "you CAN do this", Lhotka's book actually walks you through "HOW to do it". It's a well organized (video store) project walk-through, illustrating how to swap interfaces (VB forms, Excel, ASP, IIS and DHTML) to the basic business objects. Lhotka is careful to minimize network load, when relying on DCOM and shows how to work around this important problem. Lhotka's favored architecture is 4-tier, keeping the business (logic) objects separate from the interface - so interfaces can be swapped (without modifying the business-logic objects), depending upon user proximity (local or remote) and further-processing needs. These business-logic objects are designed for minimal network traffic when communicating to the db persistence objects (tier-3). The book is so careful to explain every code line that, despite WROX's grey background behind the "new code lines" (a nice touch), one can get lost in the detail of the objects. More UML diagrams, especially at the beginning of chapters, illustrating the object relationships would have helped. The writing style is rather bottom-up - often explaining the objective at the end of a chapter (or beginning of the next) - rather than top-down. Nevertheless, this book is well worth the read. The o-o conceptual introduction raises excitement about being able to financially justify using these tools and techniques, TODAY. Michael Coughlin/ Data-based Systems Corporation
Rating: 
Summary: Don't leave home without it!
Review: Another fantastic Wrox book! I have already used Rocky's design principles in a 4 tier Web application and they are already reaping the dividends (literally!). Rocky doesn't just copy out examples from the MSDN - he actually explains in great detail HOW to design a working application outlining the pitfalls on the way. Rocky guides the reader through the basic principles all the way to a full blown 3/4 tier working development using different front ends, while explaining the limitations and power of Microsoft's DNA paradigm. You will learn and understand the principles faster by actually going through the examples and using the VB debugger rather than leaving it for bedtime reading. It takes a little longer to develop an app using components but the rewards come in the reduced maintenance costs, multiple front ends without re-code and the scalability of your solutions. No more maintenance budget gobbling code monsters!! Not really for the beginner programmer though - too much melon twisting! Thanks Rocky!
Rating:
Summary: Good Price
Review: If your going to Fairleigh Dickinson University and your taking up Advanced Visual Basic Developer will need this book
Rating:
Summary: A must have for any serious VB developer
Review: If you don't have this or the previous book relating specifically to VB5 - get it now ! The author almost manages to clearly explain implementation of the layer model and why you want to in the first place straight off. I must confess, that I got a little lost about two thirds of the way through the book, but soon recovered by actually trying to create my own objects and then referring back to the book. The problems that he explains the solutions to are not always apparent at the time ; I can't really blame the author for that though - far better a solution given to a problem you are not yet aware of, than none at all. Overall this is the most valuable book on VB and indeed object technology in the real world I have ever read. My own companies applications are now heavily based around these techniques - modified and improved somewhat to increase flexibility but in reality we only needed to change his concepts by about 5 or 10%. Well, you have to have something to do as a programmer...
Rating:
Summary: Great stuff, but getting out of date? Time to go .NET....
Review: When I first read this book I loved it. Nothing of the kind had shown VB developers how to write large distributed apps before. Now that VB .NET is out, however, this book has become a lot less useful and given the direction of the outside world, I think it may be time to move on. I hadn't found any other books to fill the gap for the longest time. I tried "Building Distributed Applications with Visual Basic .NET" from Sams, which was terrible. However, I recently stumbled across a couple of truly great books. First of all is MS Press "Microsoft .NET Distributed Applications" which is fantastic!! The architecture advice and case studies are on a par with this book in the .NET world, and I can't recommend it enough. Another solid (but more technology-specific) book is Advanced .NET Remoting on APress. After reading these, I'm never going back to VB!
Rating: 
Summary: Good concepts, poor presentation
Review: First of all, this book is a great buy for a VB beginner and it offers few great tricks to handle business objects in VB. For myself, I've learned much from this book (even I've read many VB books). However, things I noticed while reading, this book has bad layout and presentation of code examples. Also, Author seems to have a grasp from the subject, but he falls down with repetitive writing which results to 'fat book'. Applying the summary of 'Code so far' instead of partial code examples, this book would have been much better. Finally, this book is not a reference book; if you want to learn business objects, you have to sit down and concentrate to keep up with author's subject. If you want to learn the basics of business objects, buy this one. If you want to find a reference book or more professional approach, look for something else.
Rating:
Summary: Rocky hits the mark
Review: What a great book! The title should actually be, "I Can't Believe I Was Able To Program Anything Without Using Class Modules". This book is really about back-end programming. It's about writing a DLL that abstracts what you want to do from the nuts and bolts work of actually doing it. And the best thing about it is that the components you write are COM compliant so they can be used with basically any language; specifically I've used them with ASP and ColdFusion. Imagine writing an ASP page like this to update someone's salary: <% set objStaff = server.createobject("MyCompany.StaffMember")
objStaff.beginedit
objStaff.load 10
objStaff.Salary = 60000
objStaff.applyedit
set objStaff = nothing %> Notice that there's no database code, no business logic, no MTS stuff, no nothing. All of these things get encapsulated in a DLL so that the front-end programmers don't have to worry about them. They just create an object, do stuff, and kill it. If that StaffMember was a non-manager, the DLL could be written to raise an error if the salary was over a certain threshold, or whatever. It's up to you, the back-end programmer, and it's not possible to bypass the business's rules by forgetting to include the logic in the GUI. Also, this is great if you are selling your app to a customer, because your code is compiled and can't be "stolen" or modified. The book got a little bit confusing to me at times in chapters 4 and 5, but I hadn't touched VB in about two years since an intro college class, so that may have been to blame. Also, it was more like "Where are we going with this?" rather than "What's going on?". However, if you struggle through to chapter 6 or so, you will have an "A-ha" moment and then it will all make sense. Believe me! I now feel like a VB 6 Expert from reading this book. It goes deeply into Debugging as an added bonus, and I don't really know how I got along without the "Immediate" window for so long. Also, VB components are so much faster and more reliable than writing (and re-writing) your business rules in ASP code. Your web apps will stop sucking and start being fast and reliable. I whole-heartedly recommend this book, and I can't wait for the VB.net update.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: If you're gonna use vb, learn to use it right. This is the right way. As close as you can get to oo in vb.
Rating:
Summary: Be sure to test drive first...
Review: As a beginner to business objects, I found some of the material beneficial. Not to say that what i found was not of great value and therefore making the book overall worth keeping. It was simply a needle in a haystack of overly complicated topics that could have been stated more simply. Such a nice table of contents (perhaps over extended in the middle to end too) is deserving of better work. I admit i have not read the entire book. But who has the time to read an entire book of this length? I read it as I have all of my other 30 or so and had more trouble linking the different parts of the book together than i should have. I would almost recommend reading this book front to back sequentially, which is frustrating. I have never purchased a CS book before with code in each chapter that did not function. This author certainly did not outdo himself in that respect. So, at the end of the chapter and the end of the day, you can download his code and it will not function as expected; If it functions at all. Even more bothersome is the inexcusable errors in the 'functioning' application. For a book praising robustness, it is quite watered down. In closing, chop the book in half, eliminating all of the redundant chatter, give it functioning downloadable code, and call it a beginning book on business objects. This book could have been much better but is still worth looking at, maybe buying; be sure to test drive first though.
Rating:
Summary: Excelent Book
Review: Fantastic coverage of concepts as well as terrific examples, and code samples. For VB programmers who have only dabbled a little with classes, this book will show you how to use them effectively. After reading this book, you'll be able to create well organized professional VB apps.
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