Rating: 
Summary: REQUIRED!
Review: This is the most important Visual Basic book on 3-tier application development. It is a tutorial on 3-tier development, as such it stands with Petzolds original "Programming Windows" in its clarity of presentation. There are loose ends, particularly error handling, concurrency, and reporting, which are not really addressed, but he does touch on these problems on his web site ... He also doesn't present the complete picture until halfway through the second book; "VB6 Distributed Objects", which is a necessary companion to this book. These 2 books are "must haves", cornerstones upon which current VB application programming is based.
Rating: 
Summary: OK for a beginner
Review: Here are a "couple of" (pun on Mr. Lhotka' overuse of the phrase) problems with the book:
1. The design is inappropriate for a web site.
Notice how the author steps around the issues in the ASP section. His ASP example is of minimal use since it does not show one how to add/edit data. If I want to use his design, I need a lot of Session variables around - a not altogether scalable solution.
2. Lack of a Graphical Model
The book really needs a graphical view of the object model with methods and properties ala Visual Modeler.
3. Development of the object model seems a bit haphazard.
The scheme is a bit harder to follow than should be. I think the whole thing should have been sketched out more in the beginning. Unlike most real-life projects, the author had a chance to do it right from the beginning. This would have been a valuable lesson on project design.
4. Absence of Design Patterns
This may be a bit more advanced, but should have been mentioned.
5. Too Fat
Like most other Wrox books, they are way too fat. This could have been trimmed down a lot. I, like most developers, do not have time to read books of 700 pages or more. I need to read a lot of books so I need the fat trimmed a bit.
Rating: 
Summary: Wordy & obtuse
Review: Don't judge a book by its volume. There are much better ones for VB/COM systems, (Rofail, et. al.; Swartzfager, et. a.) This book was a bg disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Good concepts, good ideas
Review: This book introduces great concepts on how to best develop and deploy client/server apps, but you'll have to know exactly what you have in mind to be able to apply the ideas discussed in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for anyone developing a business solution in VB
Review: The amount of material covered in this book is amazing. I would recommend this to any programmer who is experienced with VB but would like to get up to speed on Multi-tier development techniques. It proves to be a great introduction to other aspects of programming, like MTS and various web development technologies. After implementing what I learned from this book in a management system, programming became a much more enjoyable experience. Recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Some good core concepts but not Object-Orientated.
Review: Some good concepts are introduced but this book certainly can't claim to be object-orientated.There is little or no treatment of interfaces, and many of the examples use module functions where objects would have been more approriate. Worst of all, a suggestion is to disable all buttons on a window until the user enters valid information!!!! Not a very practical idea. Overall, dissappointing, and it certainly leaves out a lot of information needed to implement any reasonably sized n-tier application.
Rating:
Summary: Too much theory not enough real-world info
Review: If you don't care about performance buy this book. If you don't care about ship dates buy this book. If you have plenty of time to dabble in OO theory buy this book. This book reminds me of Grady Booch's UML books. Yeah this is good stuff, but who has time to develop software this way? For web sites, ship dates are weeks not months. Also, most of the functionality developed much more useful for traditional VB forms rather than web-style development. It's obvious that this author knows his stuff - but look elsewhere if you are trying to actually get some work done and not stay up thinking in your perfect little OO world. This book probably isn't as bad as I makes it sound, it just sounded to me throughout the whole book that the author is peddling some OO consulting courses to you. Has this guy ever done any serious development himself or just think about serious development? (hey 3 stars is a good review for me - there are a lot of worse books you could buy trust me..)
Rating:
Summary: I recommend this book for new VB6 developers.
Review: Thanks, Mr. Lhotka, for writing this book. The clearly explained business example and object implementation has helped me see how I might accomplish object oriented enterprise development for my work. I've ordered 3 other WROX books in hopes of further enlightenment on this subject - VB6 UML, VB6 Web, and XML IE5. Lots to learn. I look forward to actually applying the knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: A great book to start with OOP with VB
Review: This is certainly a great book for anyone to start programming in object-oriented with VB. Lhotka has done excellent job here for those to start with the right footing. Hardly can you find any book that teaches you step by step. End result is that you look professional. Of course, a prerequisite would be that you should be familiar with VB5 onwards.
Rating:
Summary: Really Excellent, but not for beginners
Review: For anyone like myself who is quite familar with Visual Basic, but wants his or her hand held during the steps of creating your first, real live multi-tiered object-oriented application, this is a great book. And 99% of the source code (which you can download from Wrox.com) is actually correct and compiles! I got about 2/3 of the way through the book before I found the first error, and it was minor (a typo).
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