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Rating: 
Summary: Starts out good... but gets sloppy...
Review: As a developer using VB And VC++ from Visual Studio 6 I purchased this book to get a quick start on the Interdev product and IDE. The book starts out pretty good. Introduces the VI IDE, projects, functions, basics and how to use with good effective lessons quickly. Chapters/Hours 1 thur 8 pretty good and accurate. Good Forms, Scripting, Handlers/Events, ClientSide/ServerSide lessons and they do teach and work you out using the VI IDE.. About Chapter 9 and 10, errors and non working lessons start creaping in. Never could get the Dynamic Menu Bars(Ch 9) to work, or WaterMarks(ch 9), or Scriptlets(ch 10)... as they were written... The debugging and database(ADO) chapters/lessons start working again so you pick up some benifit there, but again not exactly as the example is written... Over all, about half are skills expanding lessons that work... others are a bit exasperating and require debug due to syntax and editing errors/omissions. Must say I'm on Win 2000 Server with IIS 5... The CD install didn't work correctly on 2000(hangs in a loop), and some syntax doesn't work( like using vbCR in write method). It did teach and get me using VI... but needs clean up of accuracy, editing, details and better lessons in the last half... Should really give it a 4 cause it got me about half way with VI for a reasonable price...
Rating: 
Summary: Little to offer for beginners or pros
Review: As an experienced developer looking to get a quick jump on a new ASP editor, I thought this book was the ticket. Unfortunately, the author couldn't decide to whom he was writing. One minute I'm bored with a "hello world" snippet, and the next I'm frustrated with a (too complex for a beginner) non-functioning scriplet. Visual Interdev has a lot of slick features, but this book did very little to emphasize them--too much time was spent introducing new concepts and technologies, and not enough time was spent on the guts of a great application. That being said, I would have rated this higher had the book at least done a good job introducing the aforementioned technologies--but it fell short in that, too. Spend a little more time, and read Visual Interdev Unleashed--great chapters on the data environment and the scripting object model, as well as some good reference material.
Rating:
Summary: Not very well done ...
Review: I can only think that this book was hastily thrown together. Many, many errors and omissions require you to scramble to try to fix things yourself just to keep up with the lessons. The lessons themselves are disjointed and incomplete. Rather than allowing you to take one project and grow it as your learning evolves, the lessons require you to jump in and out of completely unrelated exercises.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book!
Review: I have to admit that I'm way late getting into the Web development thing, but this was the perfect book to get me started. It really showed me the tremendous advantages that VID provides for a professional developer above that of an HTML page markup toy like Front Page. I would like to have seen much on ASP. However, I understand that the focus was VID and the book did a great job of showing off all that it can do! I would also recommend as a follow-on to this book, the Teach Yourself ASP in 24 Hours by Christoph Wille. These two books together will get you going in on time.
Rating:
Summary: Fair Intro but not great
Review: I wanted a book to give an intro into VB and the web, specifically database manipulation. This book did OK at introducing new topics, ideas, and procedures but did not give enought examples and those it did, the code worked only about 50% of the time. For example: Chapter 19, When they speak of Initializing the Data invironment, they state "..simply insert the foloowing script into any ASP...", but they do not give even a screen shot of what it should look like or and example on the CD. Chapter 18. The Books/Authors examples provided on the CD do not work. I cut and pasted the code from the CD into my project and it still did not work. It was only my basic understanding about VB and SQL server where I could modify the code myself. Until I got an error about "converting the value into a number", which is where I said forget it. There was nothing in the book about coverting text into an integer. This book will at least tell you what Inderdev is capable of, although it's examples will not let you see it for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: It's a shame that every time someone makes a name for themselves, others come out of the woodwork to tear that person down. I started with this book over a year ago and am now developing Web sites for a living making quite a nice living. I won't say I learned everything from this book. However, I can state unequivocably that this is the book I started with and the one that got me going with Visual InterDev. With apologies to Sprite ignore the people that have personal vendettas against Mr Archer and obey your thurst for knowledge. This book has always been and still is the BEST BEGINNER-LEVEL book on the market.
Rating: 
Summary: Helpful....
Review: It's unclear where these high reviews are coming from! Having plowed through 3 chapters, not a single "exercise" has worked. The explanations are so poorly written that even with the assistance of a more experienced programmer, they defy following what the author is talking about. He says do this, do that, then don't forget to do this (all the while it's totally unclear why or what it is you're exactly doing)- then shazaam, it works! (Not). Then, there's nowhere to go. Just on to the next inevitably futile and discontiguous example. I think the reviewers who opined that the author/publisher was in a hurry are right on. Read it, it can't be followed with any form or manner of stepwise logic at all! How much help is that, 24 hours or not.
Rating:
Summary: The very best - book & author
Review: This book is *easily* the best VID book on the market! I hate it when a high-profile author like Tom Archer gets slammed by "reviewers" that obviously have a personal bone to pick with the often-outspoken Archer. However, I digress. This book really is the very best in terms of content covered, demos and explanation of code. I was also quite impressed with the author's willingness to help me work through any problems I had in getting started - something I wish more authors would do!
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