It's fun reading this collection of digressive informal anecdotes about famous (and some obscure) Englishmen. If you enjoyed "An Instance of the Fingerpost" (where some of thc characters appear) you'd like this. As a primary source for information it gets less reliable the further back it goes. Aubrey was born in 1626 so his accounts of Shakespeare and Elizathans are a generation removed, but he had met Harvey and Penn and had been through the Civil War and the rule of Cromwell.

Because its author never completed most of the entries for this biographical work, and never published it, what he did set down about his varied noble and ignoble subjects is uncensored, gossipy, perhaps unsubstantiated, and delightful. If you like browsing in Pepys' diary, or are fascinated by English life in the 17th century, this is the book to leave about for the occasional free moment.

Anyone who shares my passion for the Gospel and Ignatius of Antioch can't afford not to have this book in their personal collection. His mastery of the inner meanings of the Gospel are unparralleled. For anyone caught in the tumultuous seas of Biblical Literature, this book is the lighthouse that will guide you to truth.

I have to agree with previous reviewers, this book DOES cover quite a bit. From DHTML to IIS Applications, but it has to be considered a beginner to intermediate book on Web programming in VB6. Even though the long-term viability of Web Classes is under question, the utter lack of any quality material on the ONE thing Microsoft touts as "Web" enabled in VB6 is extremely disappointing for a book so expensive. You can debug problems with your objects in VB6 with WebClasses that you can't perform with an ASP page and a compiled dll. Do they even mention this? No.

For the interested, you can find most of the material discussed in this book by simply looking on MSDN or other web sites for articles on the subjects you're interested in. With multiple authors, that's all you will get out of this book, anyway.

I rated this 5 stars because it has the most useful writeup on writing Server Components in VB for use with ASP - chapters 9-11. I wanted to do this and had trouble getting working samples and explanations. I feel that industrial strength ASP is very ugly and unweildy if you don't encapsulate the code into components. MSDN has lots of reference material about this but little, if any, useful "how to" stuff that i could find.

This book showed me how to do exactly what i wanted to do.

Other than that, it is a good introduction into a good number of web concepts, old and new. The first 3 chapters were a good overview of Microsoft web concepts and techniques. The writeup on web classes, if you like them, is good. I really liked the CGI case study including how to implement standard input/output via the win32 API.

The relatively free use of various win32 API functions in VB help overcome a general fear of mixing VB and CC++ functionality.

The book was a bit large but was well organized. In general it gave me a much higher opinion of Wrox books.

Having purchased many other WROX books, I was eagerly awaiting this one for a current project. When it arrived I read through it like a mad man. Soaking up everything I possibly could. The examples are very clear and there are plenty of them! It covers everything from IIS, ASP and ADO to RDS, SQL, DHTML, MTS and WebClasses. All in one book! Plenty of examples with detailed descriptions and tables explaining the various methods for each function. I definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn about using VB6 for web development.