Customer Reviews

Expert Guide to Visual Basic 6 with CDROM

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

What a great book! Just as the author promised, my beginning VB skills evolved to a much higher level without my even knowing it. His code samples and narrative were so clear, I was led through very complicated tasks without first being intimidated by what I was about to do. And what great support by the author--I e-mailed him a question, and he promptly took the time to reply. A fabulous resource.

Let's see ... this book was written 6 years ago and you are wondering why I'm bother to write. Well, I didn't planed to write until I went over to Peter Wright's Beginning VB6 object which was also came about the same time as this text and I saw people still writing reviews on it. So ...

I've always enjoy reading VB6 expert guide, even when the codes didn't worked. The fix utility tool didn't really worked either (i.e., the treeview controls etc.) Then one day I found the correct codes in the site justplanes(?) and now I'm a happy man.

The author didn't spoon fed you with every nuances of explanation behind the codes, rather, he presented the topics with the codes and you go explore further. This is exactly how I wanted it. There are lots and lots of ideas here and examples that works (finally). Once you master all these topics, you will be well on your way to become an expert.

I bought this book a while ago and I was somewhat disappointed. It wasn't an expert book, but it did have a lot topics covered. I guess the expert part is that the author gives you a little bit of info and you go and figure the rest out.

The book has about 30 pages of info on a whole bunch of topics, from the winsock control to using CDO. This book had one of the only chapters on using the MSScript control that I've ever found, even if the chapter didn't have a lot of info, it got me started in the right direction.

I wish that instead of 50 pages devoted to making calls to the Win32 api, books would just have one line for this chapter: "See Danial Appleman's book" and maybe make other chapters more in depth.

The adding a help file uses the old winhelp standard. Is anyone going to use htmlhelp?

This book has a lot of content, and would be better suited to entry level Visual Basic developers.

If you have at least one year experience with VB, don't waste your money. (I'm returning my copy to the store.)

I have this a four and not a five because the technology is out of date now but it was helpful at the time.

I have read a dozen VB books and this is one of the better ones. The author, Wayne Freeze, is obviously a seasoned programmer whose experience comes through in more ways than just the sample code he offers. The examples in this book reflect solid programming methods in a succinct fashion. It might seem that the book isn't that broad because the author usually leads directly to the best way of getting things done, rather than taking a length review of all ways to do something. The coding style and approaches he takes display a lot of wisdom. The book is excellent at providing a good foundation for VB programming and has one of the best no nonsense Inet and FTP summaries I've seen. It also has something uncommon... a summary of working with Windows animated agents. In spite of its lack of database programming, this is a valuable book that will benefit any newcomer to VB as well as those wanting to strengthen their existing VB skills. I give it a strong recommendation.

This book gives the development tips for VB programmers. But there is no detail summary about COM/DCOM and ASP. For Win32 API this book is one of the best in the market.