Rating: 
Summary: Too much emphasis on OO4O
Review: An OK reference, but could use some reorganizing. The author chooses to cover OO4O in earlier chapters before covering ADO, which makes it difficult to follow the examples if you're only interested in ADO. I find myself constantly having to flip back to the OO4O chapters (which most people probably skip) to figure out what the author is trying to explain in the ADO sections. The PL/SQL sections are good, especially if you're a beginner.
Rating: 
Summary: Concise yet complete
Review: Concise yet completeThis book will sharpen your VB skill especially when it deals with OOP, but you really want to get it for the wealth of information about Oracle. We got a few copies of the book and distributed them among our programmers. Various members of the team had different skill that needed to be sharpened. Some needed a refresher course in SQL, others who came from legacy systems and learned only the basics of VB got a bit about OOP, all needed to learn about stored procedures and PL/SQL. This simple and short book gave us all of that and much more. We have opted to use ADO as our conduit to the database. The book gives us a complete reference to ADO and 3 chapters guided us in its use with Oracle. It starts with simple Recordsets and moves all the way to writing robust code using stored procedures and ADO. We've used the code in the book as a staring point to our project. If you have limited shelf space and need just one book, this is the book to have.
Rating:
Summary: Great starting point for VB / Oracle
Review: I bought this book about 4 months ago, and I lost it. I tried to avoid buying another copy, but I don't think I can do it. It is that good! It is not a must-have reference, because the content is a lil' thin. However, the author does a great job of breaking down the VB and Oracle access into two distinct catagories. He then continues addresses each technique separately and in-depth. I especially found his techniques and solution tips, helpful and stimulating. That is the reason why I will probably buy the book, again.
Rating: 
Summary: just skimmed
Review: I just skimmed this book at a book store. It did not impress me. With most of the VB programmers using ADO, the author could have devouted less pages to OO40 and concentrated on the nitty gritty of ADO and VB. If you can read MSDN and browse the NET, you don't need the book. Especially if you have even an average understanding of programming front ends and back ends.
Rating:
Summary: just skimmed
Review: If your like me, the main reason I bought this book was to use ADO to retrieve Oracle data from within my VB application. I go to that section of the book (chapter 13)and instead of solutions I find all sorts of excuses why Orcale and VB dont work together!!! His excuses include "Oracle and ADO have not been the best of partners" and after showing a code example he states "remember, you'll have to wait for ADO 2.5 before you can run this". I bought the book to get a project done now, I dont need an author telling me that "here's how its done but its not going to work until a new version of the software is released!!!!"
Rating:
Summary: Dont Waste Your Money on this Book
Review: If your like me, the main reason I bought this book was to use ADO to retrieve Oracle data from within my VB application. I go to that section of the book (chapter 13)and instead of solutions I find all sorts of excuses why Orcale and VB dont work together!!! His excuses include "Oracle and ADO have not been the best of partners" and after showing a code example he states "remember, you'll have to wait for ADO 2.5 before you can run this". I bought the book to get a project done now, I dont need an author telling me that "here's how its done but its not going to work until a new version of the software is released!!!!"
Rating:
Summary: This is the one you want
Review: Just adding my voice to the yay's on this book. Nick Snowden's Oracle VB book doesn't hold a candle to it, and reviews have said the other Oracle VB is heavy in OO40. This book does cover OO40 and also ADO. It is written in a tutorial form, which can make it a bit more difficult to get into at first, but if you take the time (I hankered down and gave it a day and a half) it is well worth it. Straightforward, workable examples, with downloadable code, demonstrate building an unbound form, using a data class, and implementing stored procedures that take parameters and return resultsets. It finally goes into middle-tier COM objects, which I passed on. The book sticks to the point with its information about PL/SQL and data access. You have exactly what you need, demonstrated in examples that you can easily alter to suit your needs. There are also referce sections on ADO and OO40 that explain the objects, with code samples and suggestions specifically related to Oracle. (For example, the connection section explains that the only cursor location appropriate to Oracle is adUseClient, perhaps obvious, but nevertheless an inconsistant error that we had made earlier.) There are only two things I would have liked to see added to this book. Though the book uses the OO technique of data classes, it doesn't go far enough into describing the reasons for doing so, which is said will be in another book. Although this is a heavy topic, it would have been nice to at least get a few pages on this, since the choice of a data class typically involves a bit more complexity and more code. And finally, it makes the error of assuming that you will cover the OO40 chapters and then do the ADO. However, you can overcome this by skimming the OO40 chapters for the descriptions that are not repeated in the ADO sections. The book accomplishes what it sets out to do. It is not a comprehensive manual for either ADO (/OO40) or PL/SQL. It is a clear, how-to on the practical marriage of the two. Buy it, buy it, buy it, beg, or borrow it.
Rating:
Summary: This is the one you want
Review: Just adding my voice to the yay's on this book. Nick Snowden's Oracle VB book doesn't hold a candle to it, and reviews have said the other Oracle VB is heavy in OO40. This book does cover OO40 and also ADO. It is written in a tutorial form, which can make it a bit more difficult to get into at first, but if you take the time (I hankered down and gave it a day and a half) it is well worth it. Straightforward, workable examples, with downloadable code, demonstrate building an unbound form, using a data class, and implementing stored procedures that take parameters and return resultsets. It finally goes into middle-tier COM objects, which I passed on. The book sticks to the point with its information about PL/SQL and data access. You have exactly what you need, demonstrated in examples that you can easily alter to suit your needs. There are also referce sections on ADO and OO40 that explain the objects, with code samples and suggestions specifically related to Oracle. (For example, the connection section explains that the only cursor location appropriate to Oracle is adUseClient, perhaps obvious, but nevertheless an inconsistant error that we had made earlier.) There are only two things I would have liked to see added to this book. Though the book uses the OO technique of data classes, it doesn't go far enough into describing the reasons for doing so, which is said will be in another book. Although this is a heavy topic, it would have been nice to at least get a few pages on this, since the choice of a data class typically involves a bit more complexity and more code. And finally, it makes the error of assuming that you will cover the OO40 chapters and then do the ADO. However, you can overcome this by skimming the OO40 chapters for the descriptions that are not repeated in the ADO sections. The book accomplishes what it sets out to do. It is not a comprehensive manual for either ADO (/OO40) or PL/SQL. It is a clear, how-to on the practical marriage of the two. Buy it, buy it, buy it, beg, or borrow it.
Rating:
Summary: What the Doctor ordered!
Review: There are only two books that guide the programmer through the maze of using Oracle in VB. After evaluating both, We've offered "VB Oracle 8 Programmers guide" to our programmers as a lead to a recent project. We've developed the project completely based on the guidelines in the book. This is a complete guide to everything we needed to know and we used the code samples as the basis for our successful project. Another advantage, our programmers learned SQL, PL/SQL and advanced their level of Object Oriented Programming in VB.
Rating: 
Summary: Looking for a quick reference? Found it...
Review: This appropriately sized book is like a pocket reference. I found tons of code snippets that I could use in production. For that I did not even have to read the book from cover to cover! Within 2 hours of my buying the book I was not stuck any more - great feeling! This book is succinct, and does not inundate you with verbage, which save a lot of time (and hence, money!).
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