groupware and communications

As a 6 year Notes developer, I know many of the subjects in this well done, progressive book, but rarely lift it off the shelf until I need a refresher on a specific topic, such as lists and what functions work with them - then pulling out the chapter on Lists is very helpful to remind me about some rarely used commands that help with a lists programming problem.

You won't find heavy duty stuff here, and not much LotusScript, but Lotus doesn't even require LotusScript for a CLP, so the book is useful for many formula and function users, as well as new developers "assigned to support Notes". The title says "Notes and Domino" which implies using Domino web capabilities, but not much of that is here either.

What about the CD? Publishers love to add a CD so they can get advertising revenue from 3rd party demos and charge you and me $10-20 more. I searched all over trying to find what was on the included CD - nowhere was there a list of what was on it, until I figured out they had files to support each "day's" lesson.

I inspected the CD and found three sections:

- "3rd Party" containing over a dozen third party demo files WITHOUT ONE WORD DESCRIBING WHAT THEY WERE. There is no listing in the index, no readme.txt file, no appendix is used like other books, no info is on the back cover or in the table of contents or in any chapter I could find. If I was one of the firms PAYING to add these demo files, I would ask for a refund - as a reader, over 50% of the names were unfamiliar and what makes the publisher think I would run an .exe file on my system without even knowing what the file does, how much space it takes or whether I can unload it later. The SAMS project manager who handled CD files for this book should be fired for this sloppy implementation of what could be a useful feature.

The second section was "Examples" with a sub-directory for each day's lesson, and the files are described at the end of each chapter, but there is no comprehensive list of all the files and what they do that you could use later for reference.

The third undescribed section on the CD was "web" which again contained no "readme.txt" file, but did contain an HTML file that turned out to have lots of useful web links to Notes ad Domino related sites. Too bad most readers won't know about that document.

Finally, unlike some other Notes/Domino books, there is no included full text Notes .nsf searchable file of the book that the buyer can keep on their laptop for reference (don't ever give us pdf files, too many problems with search and different versions required).

In conclusion, this is still a good book for Novices to learn Notes, for experienced developers to use as a reference (I liked the LotusScript chapter which is better than Lotus provides in Help). Having the chapter files on CD is helpful, but they are overcharging for a CD where the contents are not documented anywhere I could find. The associate publisher of this book, Dean Miller, should be held accountable for that problem and demo advertisers should ask for their money back. That is the reason I marked the book down to four stars from five.

Vance Jochim, CLP R5, R4 WEBworks Systems vjochim@webworks66.com

I have to say that this book has taught me a lot about Notes Designer, and that it will definitely get you up and running in the application. Lotus products can be strange and difficult to work with, and this book is a decent--if occasionally frustrating--guide for getting through Designer. This being said, I am sorry to report that the text can be misleading or muddled. Often I find that important data is just breezed over without specifics; for example, the authors will tell you a setting needs to be made, but they don't tell you where. (Note to the authors: This can be frustrating and time-wasting, as in the case of the "Tip" on page 233, in which you are advised "to make sure you specify a date and a time", but it is unclear where this is done. I never did find it, and in this case, it made it impossible for me to complete the chapter-ending exercise. I spend a good deal of time on this, and got a little cranky. The CD examples were no help.) In addition, there were at least two examples of code (formulas) that had mistakes, and while it could be argued that there if you had been paying attention you would have caught them, I daresay that these errors may have wasted someone's valuable time. On that note--and I'll admit I'm being a little anal here--there were MANY typos such as missing periods, commas, messed up font cases and styles. Again, these (mostly) minor gripes notwithstanding, this book has been quite useful; I think some careful editing might have made it great.

I took the 3 basic Developer courses one year ago, onsite at an authorized Lotus training center. Lotus Notes is only one of the many databases I support, so I have not been able to use what I learned in the classes on a daily, or even weekly, basis. I consulted this book twice today, and found exactly what I was searching for both times immediately by using the index. Thanks to the concise index, I did not have to read through pages of other topics to find my solutions. The total cost of the book was justified in less than 10 minutes!