Expert Guide to Visual Basic 6 with CDROM [Mass Market Paperback]

Wayne S. Freeze (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 1998 | Series: Expert Guide

This text aims to teach intermediate programmers to become advanced-level programmers. The new features in Visual Basic 6 include VB-to-Web aplications using Active Server Pages, optimized p-code#.EXE compiler, Visual Interdev object support, SQL, COM and ActiveX support.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

After a brief history of Visual Basic (VB), including hints on upgrading code from earlier versions, the author shares his expertise at debugging and accessing disks and files. Then it's on to using VB's date and string functions. (Here, the author includes some tips on coding for the year 2000 problem.)

Throughout this clearly written text, the author stresses a real-world approach to features that users will expect. Along these lines, he looks at how to present data in a more sophisticated manner, using the TreeView, grid, chart, and other VB controls. A section on MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) and e-mail programming offers some invaluable material for the corporate programmer, as do the chapters on printing.

Later in the book, the author looks at Internet programming, paying attention to FTP and HTTP protocols and Winsock programming in VB. He covers Windows scripting, Win32 API functions, and dynamic control programming. The book finishes with some advice on optimizing VB applications and error handling. An appendix looks at incorporating transaction processing through Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) using VB. --Richard Dragan

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 909 pages
• Publisher: Sybex Inc (September 18, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078212349X
• ISBN-13: 978-0782123494
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 2.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,264,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for the midlevel VB programmer, March 23, 1999

By 

Aaron B. Hockley (Vancouver, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Expert Guide to Visual Basic 6 with CDROM (Mass Market Paperback)

This book fills a needed hole in the range of books available on Visual Basic. If you have mastered the basics, but aren't quite ready to dive in on full fledged ActiveX/COM Database Connectivity using OOP, this book is for you.

This is an excellent book, one which is great for those developers who have figured out how to do the basics, but are need some guidance on how to harness the power of VB to develop powerful applications.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thorough, but not what I'd call "expert", August 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Expert Guide to Visual Basic 6 with CDROM (Mass Market Paperback)

I generally like Sybex's books, but this one kind of faked me out... flipping through it in the store I was intrigued by chapters like "Using Virtual Basic Functions" (was just instruction on how to use Date functions and the resource editor) and "Optimizing Visual Basic" (was just the usual things most programmers know, like doubles are slower than singles, longs are slower than ints, etc.)

So this is not an expert book like "Hard Core Visual Basic" is. But it does document VB quite thoroughly, and if you don't have the hardcopy VB docs from Microsoft, it's not a bad what-it-does and how-to-use-it reference.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great reference, April 7, 2000

By 

Blaine T. Jones "seismo" (Dahlonega, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Expert Guide to Visual Basic 6 with CDROM (Mass Market Paperback)

I'm pretty impressed with this book. I have several VB books on my shelf but this book has quite a few gems that are strangely missing from many others. The Status Bar, for example. This book explains how to provide feedback to your users through the status bar, while the topic is blatantly ignored in other VB books. It also has a great chapter on communicating with other programs. After reading this chapter, I successfully wrote an app that would launch Outlook and log me in automatically .

You're not going to learn VB from this book. It does make the assumption that you are familiar with VB. Fortunately, it doesn't assume that the reader is a very advanced programmer - there isn't much in the way of object-oriented programming in this book. For that, I tip my hat to author Wayne Freeze. It's a great reference to pull off the shelf when you get stuck on doing some of the VB tricks that aren't documented well elsewhere.