Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects [Paperback]

Peter Wright (Author)

Book Description

Series: Beginning | Publication Date: September 1998

This book is for Visual Basic programmers who have a grasp of the fundamentals of Visual Basic and want to learn how to do object-oriented development. This book is ideal for aspiring programmers with intermediate ability who wish to tackle ideas that are more complex.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects takes the beginning or intermediate VB programmer into the world of object-oriented development in this easy-to-understand book. Early chapters cover the basics of objects and modeling real-world problems. Then the text teaches you how to build custom ActiveX components using Visual Basic. (Actual coding comes only after a thorough discussion of the principles of object-oriented design.) Throughout this text, screen shots and effective examples are used to illustrate key concepts, including how to use the new VB Visual Modeler tool. Anyone making the leap to objects using Visual Basic will certainly benefit from this well-organized and clearly written text. --Richard Dragan

From the Publisher

This book deals with objects and object-oriented development with Visual Basic 6. It explains why object-oriented programming is so important today and how its use can simplify the development process as a whole. It leads the reader into the realm of actual development by using real-world examples to demonstrate the sort of problems that programmers come up against everyday.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 450 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 186100172X
• ISBN-13: 978-1861001726
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,478,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good 1st chapter but then slowly unravels, September 8, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Alexandria, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects (Paperback)

I am fairly new to object oriented techniques in VB. I used this book last spring to learn VB OOP. As I got into chapters 6, 7 and 8 it started to fall apart. It seemed that the pieces were not making as much sense.

Recently I purchased Visual Basic 6 Business Objects by Rockford Lhotka. In the first chapter he reviews basic VB OOP. When he covered interfaces I understood how to use them in VB for the first time. Before they seemed to be totally out of sync, very unintuitive, a real waste of time and effort.

Well, I went back to Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects and found out why I found the interfaces so confusing. Peter covers interfaces in chapter 3, and he really doesn't have a grip on them. His lack of understanding makes them seem useless. When I used the book last spring I thought that it fell apart after chapter 5. I was wrong. It was already going bad in chapter 3.

I also found Peter's way of congratulating himself to be irritating. The humor's corny but I can live with that. Better corny humor than none I guess.

Having criticized the book I will say this, I did learn from it. It has some weak points, but it will teach you the basics of VB OOP. When it misleads it just gets kind of muddled. The examples work for the most part.

I can't give a strong recommendation for this book, but I will say that it is miles ahead of the one by Deb Kurata. Her book seems to be an effort to evangelize programmers to her methodology for developing OO programs.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction to Object Oriented Programming with VB, November 13, 2000

By 

Beowulf (Laguna Hills, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects (Paperback)

Let me put my review in perspective. I have been programming in one language or another for twenty years. I was the project manager for a Fortune 500 company's e-commerce initiative. I do some consulting on the side. In other words, I consider myself to be a veteran programmer.

As you know by now, most programming books fall into one of two categories: expert references, or trivial introductions. Wrox books fall somewhere in between. As a result, these books usually create some controversy over who should read them. I find them to be exactly what I need, and interesting enough to read from cover to cover.

"Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects" is actually a follow-on book to Peter Wright's excellent "Beginning Visual Basic 6." Not surprisingly, this second book focuses on the implementation of object oriented programming (OOP) in Visual Basic. This was an area that I thought was given short shrift in the first book, and so I was eager to read this one.

Now, there are many OO purists out there who will assert that VB doesn't support OO programming for a variety of reasons. I would venture a guess that if you are one of these people, then this text is not the one for you.

The book opens up with a fly by of its contents, including a smattering of OO theory, ActiveX controls, and even OO design methodologies. Wright makes a few unsupported comments about the benefits of OOP that will have to wait eight or nine chapters before they are born out. Then we start writing classes and have a nice discussion about object interfaces. I particularly liked the discussion about the way VB can "implement" an interface, and how VB can simulate inheritance through the use of containment and delegation.

As a side note, I explored the possiblity of implementing interfaces through three levels of objects: given three objects A, B, and C, object B implements object A's interface, while object C implements object B's interface (which includes object A's). This is feasible in C++, but apparently not in VB. This scenario was not covered in the book. Consider this information a benefit of suffering through this review.

Object hierarchies are covered next. I enjoyed the chapter-end "questions" which recap the important topics. There have been many times when I have read a book, but when I tried to apply those lessons to a real project, I found myself a little uncertain. By working through these problems, I was able to ride with training wheels. The answers are even provided in the back of the book, which is a welcome feature compared to some of those college texts I read which just beat me up without letting me know if I was right or wrong.

The book goes on to cover ActiveX controls in detail, even those without a visible user interface. There were some redundant discussions regarding property pages. Even more disturbing was a complete lack of attention to the PropertyChanged event; this event should be called within the code so that the Properties window within VB's Integrated Development Environment is updated when you make a design-time change. The code within the book does not include this event, and as a result the classes in chapter 8 are not completely functional (they're buggy, but they're not completely broken, either).

This last point is worth mentioning: there are quite a few errors in the book. However, Wrox provides an online errata section for every one of their books, and it is a tremendous resource.

Chapter 9 is a fantastic introduction to object oriented development. The supplier management case study is a very realistic scenario for most businesses. This case study is continued in the next chapter, when we actually flesh out our design with code. I found these two chapters to be the most challenging as well as the most rewarding of the entire book. They alone are worth its purchase price.

The final chapter wraps up with business and utility objects. This is the one area of the entire book in which I was the most keenly interested, and I was disappointed with this treatment, even for a summary.

Wrox has been known to stuff their books with relatively useless appendices. This book does not suffer from that affliction. Appendix A is a nice primer for Microsoft Visual Modeler, a UML drawing tool that is based on Rational Rose. Appendix B is a three-page throwaway on database programming (a topic that rightfully should be covered in book of its own), and Appendix C contains the answers to the end-of-chapter questions.

Despite its flaws, I found "Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects" to be an outstanding book. It provided the guidance I needed to take the next step in my VB development education. If you're a novice or intermediate VB programmer who is looking for a mid level exploration of OOP, then this is a perfect place to start.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects, August 26, 2001

By 

"glynnethomas" (New Orleans, La United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects (Paperback)

SYNOPSIS: I recommend this book for it's presentation of the OOP architecture and the code samples of ActiveX objects and Business Objects. Explanations are easy to read and grasp. There are plenty of simple diagrams that help visualize many of the abstract concepts of OOP. In the step-by-step instructions, there are actual screen shots of what a programmer will see when they write the sample code. DETAILED EXPLANATION OF RECOMMENDATION: I have several Visual Basic books. However, none of them give a simple, complete example of the code needed to construct an ActiveX control that stores it's state values in a property bag. I spent two days trying to write code that would store the values in a persistent property bag. Examples that I downloaded from the Web were complex, and had little or no explanation as to HOW they worked. And explanations that I found were either terse or did not give enough detail for me to successfully construct a Control with persistent state values that a user could alter during run mode then have them save to the property bag object. At Barnes & Nobles I reviewed 40 or more books on Visual Basic. In this book in Chapter 8 "Object Persistence" the author Peter Wright provides step-by-step instructions with the full code for creating an ActiveX control that maintain state information in a property bag object. There are screen shots of how the control and message boxes will appear. The explanations of what, when, where, why, and how the code executes are to the point, easy to read and understand. I only needed one chapter, 23 pages, from this book. Yet I was glad to spend the money to purchase it. Why? It is well written, easy read, has lots of diagrams and screen shots that makes it easy to visualize concepts and control objects, and gave me EXACTLY what I was looking for. I could have used a book of this quality 3 years ago when I began learning OOP on a Java platform. Bravo!