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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VB conciliation with the world, 30 Oct 2000
By A Customer
When I found out that Michael Kaplan was writing a book, I was a little bit scared, not because I thought he lacked the knowledge to do so, like some reviews on Amazon suggest, but because there would be too much knowledge, and what if I would have problems understanding the issues? Even though most of the articles that I've read from him didn't make me feel that way, but it's different to write a 600 page book than writing just an article. Even if the book did prove to be very complex, that would not take away from either the value of the content of the book or the ability of the author. Something like that happened to me when I first read Dan Appleman API book, and now it's one of my references on the subject, but I had to read many things before I could understood what Dan was trying to accomplish.Good for me that the supposition didn't confirm to be real, and the beginning of the book with the glossary helped a lot on that, because there was in my head a lot of confusion on some of the terms, and that caused some problems reading some articles on this same subject, but with all the explanation up front I felt more comfortable progressing... And then you start reading Part I and you find stuff and problems that you have known about and that you have felt on your day to day basis, and how well they are explained. Plain English that everyone can understand, growing pace on knowledge that the author start introducing without me perceiving the fact. Eventually you realize you are understanding things that you never imagined that you would understand in the first reading, and you do not have to go over it again and again to understand what is being said. When you finish reading a part, you get the feeling that you learned a lot. BIG QUESTION: Why do I think that reading this book is important? The US is a very big country and everyone speaks the same language, they tend to forget that there are other languages in the world, besides English. In Europe where I live the countries are smaller, and they all have different languages and customs. The European Community is opening many markets for developers, because many companies are expanding to other countries in the EC, and the ones that don't follow this trend will surely be crippled. Companies are thinking more and more about having clients in different countries with unique languages and customs. In the same way, the WWW is opening an even more vast market, almost in the same manner. Even if you don't have an immediate need for a international application, it is far better to know what can be done and what are the problems are that you will be facing, and the book will help you perceive this problems. And if you are urgently in need of developing such applications, the book gives hands on solutions, with lots of examples ready to work that will save you a lot of time. This will let you concentrate much more on the application and not so much on the internationalization of it. Please excuse my bad English, Pedro Gil
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