Customer Reviews

Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming (3rd Edition)

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This book requires visual basic. So if you thought all you had to do to start programming today think again. Trying to read this book without following along in visual basic was way to confusing. So if you want to buy this book to learn programming I would also recommend you buy Microsoft's Visual Basic. You can find the current price at microsoft.com. Other wise I would recommend to a true absolute beginner buying Wallace Wang's "Beginning Programming for Dummies" Try to keep in mind you will want the most recent edition because things in the languages change with each version.

The book lives up to its title in terms of being an introductory guide to programming, but what I didn't know was I had to have the specific program "Visual Basic" as well to get beyond chapter five. This revelation left the remaining 19 chapters of the book of no value to me at all. I do have "Visual Basic.Net", but it's way too much of a process to try to convert from one program to another and learn how they work at the same time.

This book dives into various programming languages which is helpful - but does not provide clear examples or suggest how you can write basic programs. Even using Visual Studio .Net I struggled to get the code in this book to generate a working program. I would not recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn to write programs - there are much better books on the various languages. I was very disappointed by this book and have already retired it.

There are some complaints about the fact that the 3rd edition (2003) of "Absolute Beginner's Guide..." relies a lot on Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Working Edition. This is a real problem since it is not available. However, I do not agree that this makes the book useless after chapter 5. Certainly, Perry should write a 4th edition that either includes Visual Basic 6.0 on CD or uses an available language. You can skip chapters 5 through 11 and still gain a lot from 1 to 4 and the rest of the book from Part IV on. Perry's coverage of Algorithms, C, C++, Macro, Batch, Scripting languages, Internet concepts, HTML, XML, Java, maintenance & the Programming Business are superb and well worth the price of the book. You can learn Basic from another excellent beginner's book "Beginning Programming for Dummies," by Wally Wang.

I would ignore the two recent comments by goof balls who do not talk about the Perry book but about what they think Perry's political views are. I mean, what sane person cares what Perry may think on his own time? His knowledge and excellent skill at teaching programming is what matters in any review of his books.

Oscar Wild was rumored to wear panties to bed. Does that stop the narcissists from reading his plays or his novels?

--J

this book is great for learning how to program...if you can get your hands on the software. Visual basic 6.0 working edition is the model for the majority of the text and the author offers no way to get it for free, which means you have to buy it seperately. I would suggest getting a book that has the programming languages you are going to use included on a cd.