All the technical information in this section is easily available, and dare I say it, better covered, in the Domino Designer Help, complete with full-text index capabilities. There's some less-than-complete descriptions of items; the coverage of UI navigation component -- Outlines, Pages and Framesets -- is really very skimpy, in this section and elsewhere in the book.

The section on Layout Regions says in a call-out "...starting with Lotus Notes release 6, you can utilize layers as an alternative to layout regions", and that's the last mention of layers I could find anywhere in the book. I was expecting, in a book that claims to be up to date, to have the virtues of @ThisName and @ThisValue to be extolled.

And I was disappointed with even the section on navigating around Designer -- in explaining the various window panes when editing an object, it completely failed to explain the views, lists of the different design elements and their properties that you use to get to individual elements, and also doesn't explain what the various icons are that are displayed in some design element lists. To be fair here, neither does Designer Help. This is a place where Mark could have scored.

The middle chapters
Chapters 7 to 12 start to explore applications. Chapter 7 does quite a good job of explaining the standard application development lifecycle and offers an example of a project schedule in terms of the tasks to be done. For someone who has a general understanding of application development, this isn't really very earthshaking stuff.

For a complete novice it will be pretty useful, though to my mind it does not dwell enough on the need for detailed test plans to be developed as you design the application, so that as it is developed you can measure the results you are getting against some concrete criteria.

The other chapters in this section walk through the development of various relatively simple applications in a tutorial manner, so that they are pretty easy to follow. However, most of this section tells you what to do and how to do it, but not why -- the explanations here of how each piece fits into the whole are a few sentences introducing each component, and there isn't a single detailed explanation of how all the bits fit together.

Again, for an experienced Notes developer, that isn't a problem, but then the experienced developer isn't going to get much from these sections anyway. As the applications are developed, the book suggests that chunks of the LotusScript code be copied and pasted from the "working source code that has been provided" in the Web resources -- which pretty much ensures that the reader does not examine the details and understand how this code works.

And, horrors -- most of the examples in the book have few or no comments. I can see that explaining every little piece of the application would make the book even bigger, but I do think that the right balance has not been reached.