Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Programming with Visual Basic 6.0 (4th Edition)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Schneider teaches programming NOT visual basic...he does use Visual Basic to teach you how to program..so you learn great Visual Basic along the way. I recommend this book for any student or beginner programmer as their first book to buy. You will learn the right way to program from the start. Yes you will need to buy more books to go further in the future but a beginner will be occupied for 6 months with Schnieder.

By the way, a lot of Australian Universities and Colleges are now using Schnieders books as a tool to teach students how to program.

If you can already program and use VB, don't bother you will need something more in-depth...again its a fantastic beginners book.

During the 80's I took some courses in PASCAL,COBOL etc so I know how to program,I just wanted to learn VB syntax and how to work in a Windows enviroment. Trying the self study route I wasted a great deal of money on those "Teach yourself in 24 Minutes All You Need to know" books. The most common problem I encountered was VB books were either too basic or too complicated!
I decided to enroll in a college course and this was the text book. If you are new to programming and can't write out a sequence of steps in plain english as to what you want the computer to do this is not the book for you!
This book moves along at a fast clip (as did the course I took)and I saw plenty of students fall by the wayside. They needed practice in writing the logic of a program and this book speeds through that essential part. You can get a good feel for VB up to an intermediate level but this is not an advanced book. Plenty of explanations and programming projects are given that will be interesting as long as you're a beginner to VB.

Out of the 3 or 4 books on VB, this one is definately the best in how the author explains his material. Granted, other books had more information, but they were tailored for intermediate and advanced students. If you're a beginner, this book is definately the best I've seen to get into programming in VB. It's informative and also easy to read and understand.

He also is one of only two authors (the other being the Forest Lin book) who gave detailed explinations on arrays. I bought the SAMS Teach Yourself in 21 days book and the QUE VB book by Spotts, and neither of them said much about the use of dynamic arrays, the use of Redim Preserve or much of anything else when it came to arrays, which I though was an important topic.

For anyone who's beginning to learn programming in VB, I definately reccommend this book.

I am starting on programming for the first time and have been working through Schneider's book for the past two months. It is a well structured manual in comparison to other books of this kind that I have tried before, given the fact that I am doing this all by means of self-study. The examples and exercises are many and provides enough oppurtunity for clarifying new concepts. It is also very useful as a reference manual.

The book is also recommended for students starting on Visual Basic at the department where I work. It is just a pity that we have so much trouble obtaining the book and that I have not yet been able to get hold of my own copy.

I had to use this book for a VB programming class. I really like the style. Instead of laboring the point, Schneider briefly presents information on a topic, then uses examples to explain the details. If you are learner by tutorial, then this book is NOT for you because it is not a lot of hand-holding. But if you can read something, see an example, then grasp the concept, then you will enjoy reading this text and find it very beneficial.

My class project was to build a conctacts database, and this book has some great examples of how to build a database application both in the front end (forms and controls) and back end (coding SQL and VB data-handling commands).

This is among the most practical and useful of the Visual Basic teaching books I own. Although the text could be organized better, it is fairly clear. The part I like the most, though, is the exercises. Each chapter is full of exercises--more than you probably want. Sometimes the exercises take too many baby steps, but if you can skip some of them if you feel comfortable at a faster pace. Of all the books I looked at this was the only one that made sure you knew the material by giving you an exercise to do (an actual problem, not a walk-you-through like the Microsoft "Step-by-Step" title). For best results, I would supplement the theory with a different book.

I've always been interrested by the computer world and one day decided to teach myself programming. I picked up this book and started to read. At that moment, I didn't even know what a programming language was. I read it from cover to cover and didn't have the impression to learn something but suddenly I found myself programming small applications. I read other books then and today I'm a MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer). During my whole journey on the learning of programming, this one was the clearest book I've read. So, if you're a complete beginner in programming, get this book fast ! I would even recommend you to read it BEFORE moving to .NET books. If you already are a programmer coming from another language, it may not be the right choice.

When I came to university, we used the 5.0 version of this book for learning VB. I found it way too simple since I already had programming knowledge and would better have seen a book which went more deeply on the topics and covered more of object oriented programming. This book is for a part just click-and-play which might be very useful only for people who starts with programming from scratch.

I am an engineer, not a academician. David Schneider's book provided such a large number of examples, that I could find something similar to what I needed on the CD-ROM, which I could in turn copy, modify, and run.

I personally *learn* better from many small examples than one large example.

Most of the reviewers for this book seem to have had some previous programming experience, and thus, armed with an understanding of programming generally, i.e. the jargon, the logic, and general concepts, this book might well deserve a good wrap. However, it has been my first exposure to programming and I am finding that it is not a great help to a raw beginner.

This is the prescribed text for a uni subject I am doing, and I know of other students who have been very critical of the book also. In fact, the lecturer recommended that those with no prior experience refer to other books for a better explanation of the concepts!

I do not want to be a programmer - and I am not someone who enjoys spending every spare moment experimenting with code - my interests lie in other areas of IT. Having said that, I have put as much effort into this subject as any other that I have done.

Specifically, I have found that the book skips over the basics, and makes a lot of assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge. I often find myself leafing backwards and forwards through the book looking for information that I know I have previously read, but cannot find again without wasting a great deal of time because of its poor layout. There is a dearth of explanation - I know that the best way to learn programming is to do it, but if what you're doing isn't working you need to understand why and be able to fix it without wanting to throw the computer out of the window ;-)

I am searching now for some books that will help me to finish the subject. I don't want to go into the exam on a wing and a prayer, I'd actually like to do well. This book on its own is not going to get me there.

Perhaps, it's different these days, as kids leaving school may have already studied computing subjects before going to uni, but for mature age students new to programming, there is a lot of catching up to do before this book would be helpful. I hope this has been of assistance to anyone else in the same boat.