This textbook is designed for use in a college-level computer-science class. As such, The ODBC Solution has the characteristics, both good and bad, of an academic work. On the positive side, this book does a superior job of clearly showing how to open a connection to a database, perform operations upon the database, and close the connection. That is what ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is all about, after all, and any book that communicates the concepts and procedures involved in ODBC database transactions deserves praise. The authors do a fine job of explaining the ins and outs of the various API (application programming interface) calls, as well as SQL (structured query language) statements and the basics of transaction processing. All the relevant source code (in C) appears on the companion diskette.Negatively, this book covers only the outmoded ODBC 2.0 API, and the authors fail to say much about networked database applications, particularly as they apply to the Internet and intranets. (There"s no coverage of three-layer database architecture, for instance.)Taken as a whole, The ODBC Solution is appropriate if you"re brand-new to ODBC; particularly if you need to work with a legacy system that employs ODBC 2.0.