visual basic

"Visual Basic 6.0 Step by Step" is a good book. It covers many topics in VB programming well and is a decent intro to the language.

With that said, I must ask what on Earth was the author thinking when he laid this book out. There are several glaring issues with the way topics are presented. What on Earth does error handling have to do with printers and multiple forms and why are they all three covered in one chapter. Huh? To make matters worse he covers debugging in Chapter 6 with decision structures. Let's see If...Then, Select...Case and Step Into/Breakpoints. WHAT! If I were an editor on this book I would seriously have knocked that structure into Puget Sound and placed things that belong together together.

However, even with this somewhat jarring layout the book makes its points well and also provides plenty of good exercises for students. I like that.

I recommend the book as a learning text. It is archaic in some areas and it has some layout issues BUT it is a good tome.

I am an experienced Windows and C++ programmer, and bought this book based on the rave reviews to just get a handle on the fundamental structure of VB.

The text provides very clear coverage of many of the fundamentals of the language, but spends more time showing you how to do something rather than why you should do it that way. (To be fair, however, this book is a cut above the maddening "Teach yourself X in N days" texts, which don't teach you ANYTHING.) The author also persists in some bad programming habits, such as typing everything as a Variant. The simplicity of the presentation is often excessive, causing the book to give short shrift to more advanced topics. Most (if not all) of the "step by step" examples are so obvious there's no need to follow along using the IDE. Then you get to the more advanced database and DHTML material near the end of the book, and the light coverage makes the examples (and much of the text) useless.

Although I am the first to admit that this text was TOO simple for my background, I am disappointed that some topics were entirely omitted or not explained clearly, such as: Class Modules, why you would use more than one Standard Module, good practices for declaring and using application and module level constants.

So, although you will learn to make a cute VB slot machine and other programs of similar complexity, you won't learn how to produce any VB code that any competent programer would take a second look at.

The best advice is probably to read this book in a week's time to get the fundamentals, then find an advanced book that addresses the topics of real importance. When they say this book is for beginners, think "complete beginners" and know what you're getting.

I bought this and 3 other vb book for work and I think this is easily the worst one. It doesn't explain a lot of the code, which is why I bought the book. Also the way it's organized isn't very easy to follow. I bought this book because I firugre that Microsoft would know their product the best but apparently not. My advice is to look for another book on the subject.