so many o-o books that say, "you CAN do this", Lhotka's book
actually walks you through "HOW to do it". It's a well organized
(video store) project walk-through, illustrating how to swap
interfaces (VB forms, Excel, ASP, IIS and DHTML) to the basic
business objects. Lhotka is careful to minimize network load,
when relying on DCOM and shows how to work around this important
problem.
Lhotka's favored architecture is 4-tier, keeping the business
(logic) objects separate from the interface - so interfaces can be
swapped (without modifying the business-logic objects), depending
upon user proximity (local or remote) and further-processing
needs. These business-logic objects are designed for minimal
network traffic when communicating to the db persistence objects
(tier-3).
The book is so careful to explain every code line that, despite
WROX's grey background behind the "new code lines" (a nice touch),
one can get lost in the detail of the objects. More UML diagrams,
especially at the beginning of chapters, illustrating the object
relationships would have helped. The writing style is rather
bottom-up - often explaining the objective at the end of a chapter
(or beginning of the next) - rather than top-down. Nevertheless,
this book is well worth the read. The o-o conceptual introduction
raises excitement about being able to financially justify using
these tools and techniques, TODAY.
Michael Coughlin/ Data-based Systems Corporation
Not really for the beginner programmer though - too much melon twisting!
Thanks Rocky!