Customer Reviews

McSd Training Guide: Visual Basic 5 (Training guides)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

If you intend to solely use this book to prepare for the VB5 exam, DON'T. Since the book assumes that you have prior know how of the VB and it's underlying technologies, I suggest that you use this book together with the VB help and Online Book. One thing I like is the way the book was organized. The topics were divided just as it was stated in the MS website. The accompanying CD was a big let down. The more I take the practice exam, the less it makes me feel of my chances. I never scored beyond 800. There was a lot of mistakes in the practice exam. What you can do is either double check all your answers that was marked as incorrect or use a different practice test like the one from Trancenders.

To summarize, the book will provide you with enough information for your review as long as you use it with the product itself together with the VB help and the Online book.

I read this book cover to cover and found that it only provided me with 80% of what I need to know for the exam. The chapters on ActiveX technology were poorly written. The other chapters were better. I guess having multiple authors will lead to the inconsistency. These guys should have proof read each other's work. The test CD was soooooo disappointing. Some test questions were poorly worded and about 20% of the answers were incorrect. i'm sure that you'll be frustrated when you work with the practice test. Don't forget to download the errata.txt file. My final advice is to supplement this book with something else. Aside from the CD, it's still a decent book with good information. However, you need other references to fill the gap. I was able to use the Mastering VB5 CD from Microsoft and the VB Online Help file. Well, the good news is that i was able to pass the exam this morning with a score of 915. Good luck to you!

You would think that a book with eight, technically-oriented authors would have not gone to print with as many errors as this book (and CD) contained. A lot of the chapters were well put together with useful exercises. Others were more of the 10,000-foot overview variety.

I found numerous contradictions between the chapter text and the chapter questions.

With the practice exam on the CD, I was never able to score beyond 850 by answering the questions correctly.

While the publisher did make available an errata paper for both the book and the CD, it did not bring the book up to 100% accuracy.

This book had so many errors that I began to doubt the credibility of the text. When you read a book like this to pass the VB 5 Exam, you can't be questioning it's credibility. New Riders fortunately has a 5 page listing of errors that you can download from the website, however, I found that only about 30% of the errors are listed on the download sheet. Do yourself a favor and look for another title!

If this kind of amateur, sloppy effort qualifies for Microsoft certification, I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft certifications become a worthless joke in the technical marketplace. While the book does follow Microsoft's course outline for the VB5 exam objectives, the text is riddled with typos, vague where it needs to be specific, and redundant in its explanation of simple concepts. The grammatical quality of the text is so poor, it is a constant distraction when attempting to comprehend the technical content. I found myself wondering if the first draft of the book skipped the editing department and went straight to print. The enclosed CD did not install properly, so I can't even comment on its content. This is the second disappointing experience I have had with New Rider products. For reliable, professional-quality training material, I recommend avoiding New Riders and choosing one of the more established technical publishing houses (such as IDG, QUE, Microsoft Press, Sybex).

Yes there were numerous errors in the copy, but I download the erratta.txt file from mcp.com and it cleared those mistakes up. I thought it was excellent for the purpose that it was written for; exam preparation. The design was great, it was one of the better books I have used for exam prep. I used this book and the Transcender practice exams and scored a 743 when passing only requires a 614. If you can handle the typos, then this is a good choice. I recommend it.

The best thing about this book is the CD that comes with it. The computer graded test are great and help you locate your trouble areas. It's not going to show the exact questions that will be on your particular test (i.e. cheat). The practice exams (and flashcard test)will test your readiness to take the MCSD Visual Basic 5 certification exam offered by ICCP. Even if your not going to take the test the book and computer aided testing software give all Visual Basic programmers strict coding guidlines. You won't just learn how to pass the test you'll also learn good coding techniques. I wouldn't rely solely on just this book as your only source/means to pass the test, you'll have to work very hard to become certified in any worthwhile field. If more books came with test like these you can mark me down as a potential buyer.

It is a good book to passing the exam and i feel good by taking this book and i am looking for other books from new riders

This is a very good book to help me understanding all the VB concepts and passed the VB 5 exam. I am looking for its VB 6 book to prepare VB 6 exam now.

I bought this book to both learn VB and to prepare for the MSCD test, it has rich content and provides enough information to take you to the professional level of VB programming. My only complaint is the number of small bugs in the sample source code, some of it simply doesn't work at all. The provided CD also failed to install properly on either of the two systems I tried. Overall, It's not perfect, but it's probably the best book of it's kind.