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Oop: Building Reusable Components with Microsoft Visual Basic .Net (Visual Basic.Net) Review by Jason Bunting
No good . . .
Well, if you have absolutely NO experience with OOP and were looking for a good book to help you learn it . . . don't get this. :P
I think most of the practices in this book are poor. For example, and this is simply personaly opinion, there is a section on using a data access layer that they wrote (I think it stinks). Hardly a very good DAL in my opinion. The thing I don't like about it is when they tell you to use it from other layers, you still have to know about this concept of SQLServer, connection strings, stored procedures, and parameters, and that is just lame. When I write a DAL, I abstract that stuff out. How in the world would I cleanly swap my DAL out if I wanted to go from SQL Server to Oracle?! Well, using their techniques it seems that I would have to go through the code in my other layers and change quite a bit . . . Horrible!
Then, when they talk about using a security layer, they say this: "Our first thought was to create the security layer and have ASP.NET developers simply place code to check the login status at the top of each page. This approach is fraught with problems because it places the responsibility on the developer to work out the security on each page and include it." So, what do they do 2 paragraphs later? Tell you to put this header control that will handle it into EVERY page: "All the developer needs to do is put the header on the page and the page is secure." Big deal, they abstract the security into one component, and then call that from this header. But the developer still needs to stick it in every page . . . (I personally would have used inheritence for this, but whatever works.)
All in all, I think this book is about 5% useful. Seems like a good article would have accomplished the same goal, I don't see that this book has much valuable information. Thankfully I didn't pay for it, just read it via O'Reilly's Safari Subscription service!