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| Title / List Price | MCSD In A Nutshell - The Visual Basic Exams. $29.95. |
| Author | James Foxall |
| Publisher / Date |
O’Reilly and Associates, October 2000 . |
| vbRAD Rating | 5 Fingers Up (5 out of 5) |
| Length | 632 pages |
| Pros |
Gives very good coverage of the critical aspects of the topics that are in fact on the exams. Ideal for boning up on just the areas you are a little shallow in. |
| Cons | No CD to self test yourself on the book's material. |
| Who should buy it? |
Persons who already are experienced in VB but need a review of the topics and material covered by the exams. Persons trying to figure out exactly what the exams (70-175 and 70-176) cover. |
| Who shouln't buy it? | Programmers who are not already intimately familiar with VB. This is not a tutorial on VB, but rather a study guide to help prep the experienced VB professional. |
| Reviewed By | Matthew Ferry |
This book is a study guide for VB programmers who are preparing for the two
Visual Basic 6 exams, 701-175 and 70-176, which are required to achieve the MCSD
certification from Microsoft as a Visual Basic professional. This book covers
only these two tests and will not help you prepare for the other (2) tests you
will need to take.
As a study guide – it is completely different than the ones I
have seen (and the ones that I had to study with). First of all – it is not a
book for VB neophytes. The author assumes you have a strong working knowledge of
VB, and reasonably expects that someone who is striving for VB MCSD status is
most likely already a professional programmer using VB on a regular basis. If
this is not the case for you – then get a different book, perhaps one of those
oversized wooden plank covered ones with 700+ pages and huge margins and lots of
white space that is mostly full of drivel; so much drivel, in fact, that it is
nearly impossible to discern what material is really going to be on the test,
and what is just filler to make the book appear to be a good investment by
causing you to wonder if it is going to burst through the plastic sack that you
carry it home from the bookstore in.
This book differs from other study guides
in several other ways as well. First of all, because it is printed as a durable
soft-cover with dense text (unlike its armor plated behemoth bloated brethren),
the book is considerably cheaper, which is nice. If I knew then what I know now,
and if it had been available then, this would have been the only book I would
have purchased to help me prep for these two tests. Secondly – this book treats
the two tests as a single unit for studying purposes. This approach makes sense
because the two tests do share quite a bit of information and material (i.e.
there are numerous Package and Deployment Wizard questions on both exams). And
lastly, this is the one “study guide” that you may actually choose to continue
to use as a reference after the tests. Most of the other study guides claim that
they make a great reference, and some of them are right – if you need a
reference on how to install Visual Studio, or use the menu builder. This book’s
concise and informed treatment of advanced topics does qualify it to continue in
use as a reference. As the author aptly points out – VB, and its related
technologies, comprises a very large domain of knowledge, and very few
professional developers work with all of these technologies on a daily basis or
are intimately familiar with all of them. I couldn’t agree more – you may be a
VB expert, but the VB universe is too vast for you to be an expert in every
aspect of VB. This book allows you to quickly identify which topics you should
bone up on – and then concisely lays out what you need to know about those
topics. In short – this book won’t waste your time by explaining to you that
which you already know.
Topics covered by the book include: VB
Overview, COM, ActiveX Components, Data Access (ADO), VB’s Internet Features,
Testing and Debugging, Help, Optimization, MTS, Package and Deployment Wizard,
Visual SourceSafe and the Visual Component Manager. Each topic is covered in its
own chapter. The official exam objectives put out by Microsoft end up mapping
out to these topics – if you read them closely. But having taken these exams – I
can tell you that these are in fact the topics you need to know. Other study
books that I have seen are organized by the exam objectives – but that doesn’t
really relate to how experienced programmers think of this material. They look
at the exam objectives and say something like – “most of this stuff I know, but
I’m probably weak on these objectives that have to do with MTS” they then find
out that since the study guide they are using is organized by objective – they
end up having to go back and forth over multiple chapters to cover the single
topic of MTS, and in bad cases – they have to figure out which parts of each of
these chapters they should bother reading. That’s the beauty of this book – as a
professional developer – you can look over the list of topics and know exactly
what you are weak in immediately. You can then read the chapter about that
specific topic, and have confidence that the material you have covered is
relevant to both the exams and their objectives, as they map out to that
topic.
If you are a professional developer
seeking certification and don’t want to waste your time with inadequate study
guides designed for the guy who just got the “VB6, Learning Edition” software –
then this book is for you. And by the way, if you are a professional developer
seeking certification, and you think you don’t need a study guide at all – then
think again. That is unless, you can honestly profess expertise in all of the
above topics, which I think, very few people can. Most professional developers
would have expertise in some, to be sure, perhaps familiarity in the rest, but
definitely not expertise in all of these areas. The reason is simple –
developers become specialists because people don’t waste time learning what they
don’t use. And hardly anybody uses every aspect of the technologies represented
by the above topics. Lets say you are a very seasoned VB developer with many
years of experience developing complicated n-tier enterprise scale apps with
multiple front ends and interfaces, and you’ve had ample opportunity to use
every aspect of all of these technologies in your development (even ActiveX
Documents!). So you go and take the test and fail – not because you are
incompetent – but because you have built dozen’s of installs using InstallShield
(your company’s standard) and don’t know squat about the package and deployment
wizard.
Don’t let that happen to you. Buy this book and bone up on what you need to bone up on. Its well worth the thirty bucks.