Lastly, there is a chapter on Troubleshooting, which I'm afraid, again, is pretty basic stuff. This chapter also discusses error handling in LotusScript, and here is just the wrong place for it. A reasonably experienced application developer will already know generically about error handling from earlier experience, so there is no excuse for this stuff not having been introduced in the LotusScript chapter as something you just do routinely in every piece of LotusScript that gets written, with very few exceptions.

Any Notes developer who has had the Object Variable Not Set message box appear knows the value of built-in error handling that explains which line in what Sub caused the error. I've also written about ways of reporting errors before, in "LSI_Info: obscure but useful information in LotusScript" (at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200606/00001780001.html).

Online material
Finally, there is on-line material available to anyone who purchases the book, and there are plenty of pointers throughout the book to content on the developerWorks/Notes.net site. These are, in the main, useful background material pointers, and I'm pleased to see them included.

The online content at IBMPressBooks.Com took a little tickling up of their helpdesk before I could get at it, so I hope that it's also available for any purchasers. I wasn't able to test the exact method of getting to it that's described in the book.

But what's there online is what's described in the book, including complete worked examples, and even some extended version of the application projects that were worked through in the second section of the book. You could argue that having these ready to go could save you the cost of the book in time saved, but it's a bit of a thin argument.

Should you rush out and buy it?
So, the book overall. Does it achieve the goals it tries to set out to achieve?

Well, mostly, no.

At face value, it is a decent beginners book to Lotus Notes development, but there's an assumption, stated in the introduction, that readers will have experience of application development. That assumption seems to percolate throughout the book.

For example, the book says very little about testing the application against a test plan and how to be sure that the application works properly. Experienced developer will just do this anyway, but beginners don't really know about such things.

Indeed, it really says very little about how to design Notes applications. And, here, I mean design as the intellectual exercise of working out what components you need to build and how they interact with each other to fulfil the requirements of the application, not the actual build process with Domino Designer.

That would be something that an experienced application developer coming fresh to Notes would need to know just as much as the novice. Similarly, treating Security and LotusScript error handling as things mentioned at the end of the book rather than as key parts of the application design and construction doesn't sit well with me.