Teach Yourself ODBC Programming in 21 Days

Rating:
Summary: Genaral description for only experianced vb,c programmers.
Review: + This book gives genaral description about working of ODBC. Good for VB programmers who heard that ODBC is fast but used jet and always wondered why it is so slow with big databases. - A floppy containg samples is much desirable.

Rating:
Summary: Genaral description for only experianced vb,c programmers.
Review: + This book gives genaral description about working of ODBC. Good for VB programmers who heard that ODBC is fast but used jet and always wondered why it is so slow with big databases. -A floppy containg samples is much desirable.

Rating:
Summary: Want only 1 ODBC book? This is it.
Review: I have used this book for two or three years now in my VB consulting business. I find almost all the answers I need in it. These folks explain how ODBC works from the ground up. Once you get past the theory there are nicely organized chapters covering everything from how to connect to what you do once you're connected. There are lots of C and VisualBasic examples, and as far as I can remember, they all worked -- a real plus. I found the writing style to be as entertaining as any nerdy book is likely to be. Lots of detail, lots of context, lots of perspective. If you don't find your answer in this book, chances are good the authors will point you in the right direction. And don't miss their discussion on ODBC tools. If your VB clients insist that you use ODBC then put this book in your bag and carry it with you every day.

Rating:
Summary: Worse that you could possibly imagine...
Review: I'm sorry that there is not a rating of zero or less. Imagine, if you will, any bad quality that an instructional book might have, and feel free to apply it to this book. The best thing I can say about this book is that it's got a sturdy binder. First, the intro. says that the book is for anyone who can write Visual C++ programs on their own. It says nothing of prior database experience. Having none, I took the authors at their word. However, a week into it, and I've no idea what they mean when they say bound and unbound columns. The basic architecture of a database is not described. This is a gross problem with the book. It's 'who this book is for' section should let one know this... Also, the editing is horrific! 'Sentences' which have no meaning, missing operands in the tables, as well as a gross lack of new term definitions recur throughout. How could they have created this book on purpose? There is not even any code in the entire first seven chapters of the book! They go on about the history of ODBC, which might be marginally important and somewhat interesting, but can't we all agree that actual working examples of real programs are at least slightly more important than a history lesson when you're trying to teach how to write programs?? I got the impression that they were padding the book with this sort of thing in order to squeeze out 21 chapters, but I have yet to find anything but filler. In my experience, instructional texts are most useful when there are useful examples sprinkled around...are they trying to save the best for last? Do yourself a favor and don't bother with this disaster.

Rating:
Summary: A decent book if you're using VB, but bad for C
Review: While the book had extensive coverage of using ODBC in VB, it had very little actual code for C. Most often it just had the function prototypes and hardly more, barely explaining what the parameters meant and very rarely giving a code example. The examples given were muddled with MFC code, and it even had a section simply walking you through an appwizard project. I ended up getting better information using online help, which covers the topics much for extensively. I had previously been trying to work from docs at the MS site, and found this to be somewhat easier, but not much. Overall, it has some good points. I mainly use it for the error codes, etc it has listed.