Lotus Notes and Domino R5 Development Unleashed by Deborah Lynd , Steven Kern Search Amazon for other books by or about Deborah Lynd. Rating: Reviewed by: Douglas Malcolm

Way back in the IT glory days of 1998, I seperated from the United States Navy and signed on with an IT consulting firm. They said to me "Go forth young webmaster, and become a Lotus Notes developer". I did, and lo! Life was fine, and rife with challenge. I coded new apps, I revamped and web-enabled older apps, I pursued and achieved the highest certification level that Lotus offers for application developers. Heady times.

Life moved on, and so did I. Flash forward to 2002. My current Dot-com had became a Dot-bomb, and I found myself looking for work, along with hordes of other unemployed techies not unlike a swarm of locusts. Previously, sending out 10 resumes would result in my phone ringing 10 times, but now I was hard pressed to get my phone to ring at all.

Time to get back to basics.

Employers like certifications, and in tough times, anything to stand out will help. What does that limit my options to? Cold Fusion, and Lotus Notes. Notes? Yikes. Haven't used it in almost 2 years. What can I do about that?

Grab an Unleashed book, of course.

Actually, I throw that out there casually, but the "of course" part wasn't always the case. In fact, Domnino R5 Unleashed represents a milestone of sorts for me - my acknowledgement of the return to excellence of the "unleashed" series. I'll not specifically name the Unleashed tome that drove me from the series in the past, but it was all the way back in 1998 - obviously the quality control issues have been fixed, and fixed well.

The book itself is authored by more than one person, and this can (and did) lead to some minor continuity issues, both in style and in substance, but I suspect I only noticed them because I'm an exceptionally picky reviewer. Truthfully, R5 Unleashed is as fine an example of technical book editing as I have seen. That doesn't mean it is error-free, just that it's as error-free as we can reasonably expect a book to be in such a deadline-driven and fungible genre.

As I first started to read the book cover to cover, I would finish a chapter on a given topic and think "But wait! They didn't cover X, Y, and Z. What the heck? How do I do this or that?" It turns out I was worried needlessly - R5 Unleashed builds upon itself from chapter to chapter. The opening bits are more aimed at the determined beginner than a seasoned developer coming back to the fold. Skim across them to remind yourself of just how much you've forgotten, move on to the later chapters, and you'll be delighted with the depth and detail of coverage.

Some chapters give seeming short treatment to their subjects (the one on Javascript comes particularly to mind), but it bears remembering that they are not necessarily setting out to teach you the javascript language itself (you will definitely need another reference for that), but instead they are teaching you how javascript fits into the Notes R5 development architechture as a whole. Fair enough.

All things considered, R5 Unleashed rates a strong 9. The topic coverage is neither too focused, nor too diffuse, striking just the right balance of detail needed.

In a field littered with books that are unacceptably poorly written and edited, this was obviously written by folks who actually care about the quality of the product they put out. It's not perfect, but it's one of the best I've seen. Highly recommended.