Visual Basic Oracle 8 Programmer's Reference

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.

This 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

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.

An excellent detailed book. Clearly demostrates the power of VB and Oracle (working together) with real world examples. A first of it's kind. - LD

I found it to be an Excellent Learning tool for SQL and Oracle. The chapters dealing with SQL and PL/SQL are real gems. The applications are simple enough yet encompassing enough to serve as real-life example of how to code VB, SQL, and PL/SQL for a successful project.