Rating: 
Summary: A timely addition to any scientist¿s library
Review: A paradigm shift in today's pharmaceutical industry is forcing many traditionally trained scientists to embrace an automated environment. As a result, software for controlling instrumentation is more important than ever and many companies have turned their efforts toward in-house development to answer this need. In their book, Mark Russo and Martin Echols show how today's most popular Windows development language can be used to create robust and reliable software for instrument control. The authors also include a terrific section on graphical displays, which will help you provide the user friendliness and visual representation of data that your users will expect. This book was a lifesaver for me. I recommend that anyone looking at integrating automation into his or her company's workflow buy this book and read it before doing anything else!
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of Time and Money
Review: Based on the earlier reviews, I though this is a good book to read. But I was wrong. I think all earlier reviewers (other than one review that rated it one star) probably do not know how to use help in Visual Basic. If you want to use PCs for monitoring project, just read VB help for comm port control. This book is full of examples and not much explaination about understanding of serial communication. I totally agree with review of December 9, 1999 that any one who has any knowledge of VB should not buy this. Reading this book was a total waste of time and money.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time and Money
Review: Based on the earlier reviews, I though this is a good book to read. But I was wrong. I think all earlier reviewers (other than one review that rated it one star) probably do not know how to use help in Visual Basic. If you want to use PCs for monitoring project, just read VB help for comm port control. This book is full of examples and not much explaination about understanding of serial communication. I totally agree with review of December 9, 1999 that any one who has any knowledge of VB should not buy this. Reading this book was a total waste of time and money.
Rating:
Summary: What a waste!
Review: For any programmer with more than a day programming experience in VB SHOULD NOT buy this book. Within its 350 pages, about one third of them are coming from Microsoft VB's user manual. There are many chapters have only few pages. And there are not may sample codes.
Rating:
Summary: What a waste!
Review: For any programmer with more than a day programming experience in VB SHOULD NOT buy this book. Within its 350 pages, about one third of them are coming from Microsoft VB's user manual. There are many chapters have only few pages. And there are not may sample codes.
Rating: 
Summary: Useful addition to your reference library...
Review: I am surprised at some of the negative reviews of this book. This book contains some very useful material especially the TCP/IP and Parser Class topics. The only reason that I didn't give it five stars is because of the space wasted on a review of the Visual Basic Language. I used some of the ideas in this book in a VB Human Machine Interface (HMI) application that I developed. The source code is available at ....
Rating:
Summary: A practical book with a clear focus
Review: I really like this book! It covers the topic in detail and to makes an important contribution to lab automation literature. It is an excellent resource for learning Visual Basic and then applying it to laboratory operations.
Rating:
Summary: Top notch, for the novice to experienced lab programmer
Review: I really like this book! It covers the topic in detail and to makes an important contribution to lab automation literature. It is an excellent resource for learning Visual Basic and then applying it to laboratory operations.
Rating:
Summary: Nice book on Automation with Visual Basic
Review: If you want to study Visual Basic with this book, it may not be a right choice. However, if you want to do automation with VB, this is a right book. Several topics in this book are very useful to me. 1)Communication methods with VB. One of the foundamental thing in automatic control of devices/instrument is to establish the communication between computer and devices/instrument. Several useful methods are covered. They are Dynamic Data Exchange(DDE), RS232(computer serial communication), and TCP/IP. This book will not enable you to understand in deep details what's really going on in RS232 or TCP/IP communications, but this book will definitely enable you to implement these methods. Actually, in most cases if not all, we do not need to know what's really going on in RS232 or TCP/IP communications at all. 2)Device control and data handling. This part covers how to handle the data transferred in communication--parsing, and control multiple devices/instrument. 3)Graphic interfaces, which will enable developers to build a friendly interface between the control system and end users. Please do not overlook this, it is most probably that the users' commends on your system depend a lot on this interface, because this is what they can see and handle with.This book is one of the valuable books on my shelf, and I would like to recomment to other people. Anyway, all depends on what you need and what you expect. This is just my 2 cents. Good luck in finding a book valuable for your use.
Rating:
Summary: A practical book with a clear focus
Review: If you want to use PCs for any kind of monitoring or control project, this book will give you a quick start. It covers both RS-232 and TCP/IP communications. It even shows you how to display and graph your data after you've collected it. Experienced Visual-Basic programmers will pick up many tips, and beginning programmers will find a good introduction to using Visual Basic for a practical purpose.
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