Professional ADO 2.5 Programming (Wrox Professional Guide)

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive guide
Review: I found this book to be an excellent, in-depth guide to ADO/RDS. While I have other titles that touch upon ADO, this book provides me with truly comprehensive information. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for in-depth coverage of ADO/RDS.

Rating:
Summary: Lack of cross browser information annoying
Review: This book covers ADO 2.5 pretty well, but I feel a smaller volume similar to "ADO 2.0 Programmer's Reference" is more useful. In my work most of the time what I need is to look up ADO connection string syntax, or methods and properties of the Recordset object, or names of ADO constants, and that's when a pocket-sized reference book comes in handy. Granted that ADO is a big topic, but WROX has so many other books (for example Professional ADO 2.5 RDS Programming with ASP 3.0 and Professional Active Server Pages 3.0) that cover the exact same topics as this book, and it is difficult to avoid repetition among books, when you have another full volume on ADO. For example, the chapters on XML, Data Shaping, RDS, ADSI, and Exchange Server have all been covered in other recent books by WROX with greater details and better examples. Therefore, I find the Appendices are actually the most useful part of the book to me.

Bottom line: I cannot throw away my "ADO 2.0 Programmer's Reference", even after I got this book, and to the editors at WROX: bring back my Programmer's Reference!

Rating:
Summary: Choice
Review: This book is great for any mid-level user of ADO. Beginners will have a little difficulty keeping up with some of the concepts due to the fact that it moves quickly and gets very techinical with examples. ADO Experts will probably find this book annoying since most experts in any programming practice usually look for good references. Good news for the experts though: the index is very detailed. If you are an expert, get a reference book. If you are a beginner, get the beginning ADO book, and if you are a mid-level user, GET THIS BOOK.

Rating:
Summary: Great for mid-level ADO users
Review: This book is great for any mid-level user of ADO. Beginners will have a little difficulty keeping up with some of the concepts due to the fact that it moves quickly and gets very techinical with examples. ADO Experts will probably find this book annoying since most experts in any programming practice usually look for good references. Good news for the experts though: the index is very detailed. If you are an expert, get a reference book. If you are a beginner, get the beginning ADO book, and if you are a mid-level user, GET THIS BOOK.

Rating:
Summary: Average
Review: This book is not a beginners baby book, this is a programmers to programmers book, so you want to learn ADO with this dont waste your money. The book explains pretty well all concepts with real code and real situations. (OLAP,XML) etc. ; if you are programming Visual Basic Database applications this is a must have as your personal reference. The book is very clear explaining all the advanced techniques and the source code logic is A++++++, not like other authors that have a logic that they are the only ones that can understand it.

Rating:
Summary: Shallow, pointless
Review: This book is useless as a reference or for debugging purposes, which is the only reason I can imagine for buying it as it is no general guide. I've tried to work with this book for a while but it is useless- as another reviewer mentioned, the real resources are elsewhere, mostly in MSDN online.

If Microsoft products worked the way they were supposed to, no-one would need to buy such books, yet the authors seemed to assume they always do. I'll be waiting for another third-party group to print a reference, and avoiding Wrox books on microsoft topics in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Choice
Review: This is a very good book, very easy to understand and plenty of examples. It is a good guild book provides all the detailed information you need to master ADO 2.5.

Rating:
Summary: Ridiculously poorly indexed; writing's not much better
Review: This is one of those amalgamated code books that seems to have been put together for no other reason than to enrich the authors. It is not comprehensive, it provides no insights into best practices, and, worst of all, it can't even be used as an effective reference because of the really astoundingly bad index. Look at the Bill Vaughn book for something really worth reading.