All windows developers need to use ADO. ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) 2.5 is Microsoft's latest Data Access technology. It is used to enable fast and efficient data transfer between a database and the end users. What's more, ADO 2.5 works across a range of languages (VB, VC, ASP, Access, Office etc) and with a range of back-end databases - SQL Server 7, Oracle 8i, Access 2000 etc. Almost all developers work with some combination of these technologies, so they all need to know ADO.
Brian Matsik is the President and Senior Consultant with OOCS in Charlotte, NC. Brian is MCSD certified and specializes in entrprise and Internet development with Visual Basic and Visual Interdev.
Johnny Papa (a MCP, MCT and MCSD) is a trainer and a developer with Blue Sand Software, Inc in Raleigh, NC where he specializes in DNA architecture developing in VB, ASP, ADO, MTS, RDS, SQL Server and DHTML technologies. Johnny has co-authored several books including Sam's SQL Server 6.5 Programming Unleashed and the upcoming 7.0 release of the same title. In addition, he often contributes articles to Visual Basic Programmer's Journal (VBPJ) and Microsoft Internet Developer (MIND) and speaks at various industry technical events.
Simon Robinson is a former academic who specialized in post-doctorate computational physics & mathematical modeling, mostly in quantum physics and superconductors. He subsequently worked as 50% programmer and 50% evaluation / researcher for Lucent Technologies, until June 1999, and now works freelance. He has 11 years continuous programming experience. A recognized expert in COM/DCOM/ATL, ADSI, Active Directory, MFC, LDAP, C++, VB and MMC.
David Sussman gained experience in BASIC, Pascal, COBOL and OCCAM, before joining a UNIX system house where he stayed for 4 years, becoming the chief UNIX/C guru. For the last 3 years he has been working for a Microsoft Solution Provider, specializing in Access, VB and SQL Server, as well as playing extensively with every Beta product that comes his way. He has worked with Wrox Press on a number of projects including ADO 2.1 Programmer's Reference and Professional Active Server Pages 3.0