Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Developing Applications with Visual Basic and UML The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series) by Paul R. Reed Jr., Francesco Balena, Grady Booch ISBN: 0201615797 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 04 November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Rating: 5
Summary: Design effective VB applications With UML
Comment: Visual Basic is the wild west of modern software development tools, supporting RAD (rapid application development) and seemingly promoting a ready, fire, aim approach to developing applications. UML, the Uniform Modeling Language, and a software process aren't always easy to use with VB, and most UML books take a high-level view that make it hard to apply to VB development.
Developing Applications with Visual Basic and UML breaks ground in an area where I've seen no other book yet do a good job, applying UML to VB. UML is a complex design notation that works best with object oriented design and programming tools, but VB 6 is at best object-based. Reading most generic UML books requires, at the very least, an advanced degree in computer science, keeping it to the intellectual elite of the software world. The author has bridged this gap effectively, relating the various diagrams and tools in UML to VB applications, demonstrating how you can apply them to real applications. And relating terms and concepts in VB to those in UML is a big help as well.
This is a complex, in-depth book, and it would be easy to get lost in the conceptual discussions and sample project. But between the clearly marked process diagram used consistently throughout, goals and checkpoints that start and finish each chapter, and constant relating of new concepts to those covered before, the author helps the reader stay clearly focused on the big picture and which part is being discussed.
Rational Rose is used as the sample design tool throughout the book. This might annoy readers using other tools, but the Rose-specific discussions were light enough that you should be able learn the technique well enough to apply it with other tools. The author sometimes gets bogged down in a few too many step by step listings to accomplish a given task in VB. Anyone picking up this book had better have a pretty good feel for VB already, or will become quickly lost.
The one thing that mildly annoyed me is that the author introduces yet another design process methodology, his Synergy system. Synergy seems reasonable enough-I haven't yet given it a work out-but I'm not sure that the world needs another methodology.
I'm not sure that you could sit down, read this book, and emerge an effective design engineer for enterprise applications using VB. But if you have a good feel for what it takes to build robust applications, have some familiarity with software engineering concepts, and have struggled applying them to VB projects, the book provides an excellent bridge between VB and UML. Certainly the best I've seen so far, and applying the techniques are sure to improve your development projects.
Rating: 5
Summary: Very practical, bound to be a classic.
Comment: This book is one of the most useful books I have ever owned. Buy it, read it and place it in your inventory next to the other classics on the top shelf because you will reference and recommend this one again and again.
Process and structure are increasingly important as VB rapidly moves into the backoffice of corporations and becomes the de facto development platform for more and more business critical applications. Couple this with the fact that the Microsoft-based technology landscape causes us to rethink our application domain on a daily basis and process and industry accepted approaches become an absolute necessity.
Mr. Reed outlines a pragmatic approach to using UML within a process (Synergy process) with VB development better than anyone else. The book covers UML techniques in the proper depth without making the reader muddle through pages of useless text. The example outlined in the book is solid and provides an understandable story anyone can follow and instantly apply to their own situation.
Mr. Reed's experience lends creditability to the concepts in the book and helps the reader understand how to apply these concepts. He distils the copious topics of UML and using a development process into a single book that would otherwise require the reader to work through several books in order to understand these topics.
Hopefully the next version will be in hardback in order to endure its years of use.
Rating: 4
Summary: Ties many concepts together - UML + VB + Rose + COM +++
Comment: The theme here is 'process' and round-trip engineering using a tool (Rose). Although it assumes knowledge of UML and Visual BASIC it spends some time introducing its OO aspects and how UML maps to VB. The focus of the book is the Synergy process that uses the UML notation and applied here in VB. Personally I believe that each developer or team should have their own process depending on the domain and type of project but nevertheless there are some great techniques to borrow from Synergy and add them to your own. In particular the discussion on use case analysis and the progression to class design from that is very good. Weaved throughout the chapters is the use of Rose for keeping code and design in synch so if you are not a Rose fun this might get in the way. Worth noting is that the case study is taken through the whole project life cycle stages and the climax is the translation of the same code/design of a standalone system to run in MTS and then a further iteration is described for giving the application an ASP web interface - excellent stuff if you are interested in Microsoft's component technologies.
 |
Title: Visual Basic 6.0 Business Objects by Rockford Lhotka, Rocky Lhotka ISBN: 186100107X Publisher: Wrox Press Inc Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
 |
Title: Professional Visual Basic 6 Databases by Charles Williams ISBN: 1861002025 Publisher: Wrox Press Inc Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
 |
Title: Beginning SQL Server 2000 Programming by Robin Dewson ISBN: 1861005237 Publisher: Wrox Press Inc Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $49.99 |
 |
Title: ADO 2.6 Programmer's Reference by David Sussman ISBN: 186100463X Publisher: Wrox Press Inc Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
 |
Title: Building N-Tier Applications with COM and Visual Basic(r) 6.0 by Ash Rofail, Andrew Bell ISBN: 0471295493 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 25 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
