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From the beginning I liked this book. However, once I'd finished reading it I still felt that overall it is a good book, but it is let down by its poor C++ examples (I feel unforgivable in a post C++ Standard publication) and its poor .Net chapter which is just plain wrong in places.

The contents shows that the book is divided into the usual few introductory chapters, one which explains how to use ADO from various different languages, and then goes on to look at some of the familiar ADO objects such as Connection, Recordset and Field. Towards the end of the book there is also a chapter on

ADO.Net

. The final third of the book is comprised of an ADO API reference and three appendices, Introduction to SQL, The Properties Collection and ADO Errors.

This book is aimed squarely at VISUAL BASIC developers. Although ADO: Active Data Objects describes a COM based technology and includes a chapter on creating and using ADO objects form other languages (such as C++), the remainder of the examples in the book are in Visual Basic. Many of the examples are difficult to translate directly into other languages, especially if you are not familiar with COM in that particular language. This is particularly true of Chapter 8: The ADO Event Modal, as COM events are handled for the user by the Visual Basic IDE.

If you are a Visual Basic developer or a C++ developer with previous experience of COM and the basics of the ADO C++ API, then I would recommend this book if you wanted to know more of the details of ADO and how to use them effectively.Embedded Programming