Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Basic 6: Complete Concepts and Techniques (Shelly Cashman Series)

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

 

 

I teach Advanced Visual Basic. I inherited students who took the prerequisite course, Visual Basic from instructors who used this book. All the students I got in Advanced Visual Basic had absolutely no idea about programming. All they could do was draw good looking forms with some controls on them and copy the code from Shelly and Cashman book. It does not provide challenging, unsolved programming projects for the students. All the students learn is to copy its forms and its code. Whatever this book is, it cannot serve as a good textbook!

For my Advanced Visual Basic, I use Chapters 7 through 12 and appendices of "Computer Programming with Visual Basic 6: A Problem-Solving Approach with Cdrom" by Alka R. Harriger,Susan K. Lisack,John K. Gotwals / Paperback / Prentice Hall, and I like it very much. Frankly, Chapters 1-6 of the Harriger et al book would be much better for the first course!

First there'e the misleading title - COMPLETE CONCEPTS & TECHNIQUES
Once I went through this book, I found it very easy & thought I was really a PRO in VB6.
I got a rude shock when I actually met my programming friends: If you think you are a pro and can create useful applications with this book, you cannot be more WRONG. This book teaches you nothing about VB6 language. All it does is teaching you to layout a nice form & some extremely elementary code.
I personally do not think you can create anything useful based on the knowledge from this book.

This book was extremely useful to me in and out of my Visual Basic class. I used it for an intro to programming class in which I found it very easy to use. The book went step by step with pictures that basically spelled out exactly how I needed to do each task. The best thing about this book is that it brings you from the basic levels of VB to the more advanced topics. Now, as I go into my more advanced programming courses, I use this book as a reference. It is ideal if you want to learn VB on your own, and as a text book I give an A+. I recommend this to the beginner to intermediate programmer.

this book is great for someone that knows a bit about programming or VB in general. Its not a book for "Dummies". If you never programmed before, try something like "VB for Dummies". I hear they are great books for inexperienced users.

The purchase of this book was a horid mistake. Only people who either want to learn a VERY little bit of VB or have cash to burn (in which case you should e-mail me for some ideas) should buy this book. There are other books which have a much lager, more usefull, scope. The book does hold your hand throughout the proccess, but it never lets go. The pace is way to slow, even for the newest newbie. The authors must have had elementary school children in mind while editing. It's more of a kids picture book than a textbook. Trust me... don't waste your money!!

... if you want to learn something and don't want to lose your sanity prematurely, look elsewhere. This is by far the worst book on programming I've seen in my entire life. It lacks very basic information, code examples are not what you would want to learn from and there are TONS of typos. Makes you wonder how it got published in the first place.

I am using this book along with a university course in VB6. I find the book helpful and clear, although maybe TOO clear. I mean, once you learn really basic simple stuff like how to draw buttons and place items on a form, I think that they should then drop the painful step-by-step instructions on how to do those things once you get to later chapters and move on to the CODE (the new stuff). Other than that I find the book very helpful.