Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Developers Workshop: With CDROM

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

 

 

I have been a certified MCSD regarding Visual Basic, this book helped me lot in passing the exam, at the same time, I am still using this book for the good examples given in it. Again Microsoft wouldn't publish a book that they think wouldn't be useful.

When I started to move to a VB 5 project, I asked three people for book recommendation. This is the only one they all memtioned.

I got this book to work on the project and igave me very good help to develop my programming skills. It has enough topics (perhaps not allof the important topics) for people doesn't have much experience with Vb and want to have some example and smaple codes as reference. When you have more experience, this may not be the book as good as before, but still very nice to keep it in hand for those topics you want to refresh or never touched before.

This book was very disappointing and frustrating to say the least. It started off ok, but several code examples I tried didn't work, producing various errors. I copied the code EXACTLY and had 2 people verify it, but just returned errors. For beginning or refreshing your VB skills, I'd recommend Halvorson's Step-By-Step VB5 or Sybex's "Visual Basic 6 Complete", which is an excellent book for learning and reference....probably the best buy for the money. It can easily be used with VB5 (which is what I'm using) as well, since the code is still the same.

This book isn't really for newcomers to the Visual Basic world, it covers many topics, but none in detail, and that's a real shame.... I was lucky to have some experience in VB before reading this, because sometimes everything isn't as clear as you'd want it to be.... And not everything I'd like to see covered is actually covered in the book... Nice to have as a reference though....

Impossible to follow! Bad examples! Incomplete! Touched on a thousand different topics and didn't explain any of them well enough to be able to do them unless you already have extensive experience. The catch is.... If you already have extensive experience, you shouldn't buy this book anyway as it would be a waste of your time.

This book teachers nothing about VB. It all deals with stupid Active X. Which no one cares about. It is a total waste of money. Never buy this book

"Developer's Workshop" is an excellent reference that belongs on every Visual Basic programmers' bookshelf. It is a collection of key Visual Basic programming topics. You will enjoy your initial skim through it. I will be surprised if you don't find at least a half-dozen tips you never thought about before. It was hard to decide which topic in the table of contents to browse first. At the risk of sounding like a nerd, it was a fun read. You will pick it up frequently when you ask yourself "How do I ...?" -- the theme of this book. "Developer's Workshop" does an excellent job of pointing out how to use features properly and professionally, and explains what to watch out for to avoid future problems. This book has no VB tutorial, and it has no in-depth topics (e.g., on object-oriented programming, etc.). "Developer's Workshop" is as organized as a collection of "How Do I ...?" topics can reasonably be. The topical discussions are concise and complete with examples. For C++ programmers, this book is similar in coverage to Plum/Saks' "C++ Programming Guidelines" and Meyers' "Effective C++" (though less detailed in its explanations of each topic).

I had the unfortunate experience of trying to use this book for a Level II VB class. Needless to say, it was a bad choice. The entire class, including the teacher, didn't even use it.

This book was obviously written by a C++ expert, based on his examples (who cares how to convert to an un-signed 16 bit integer something or another), and his poor and cryptic naming conventions that made it very difficult to follow the examples.

He also throws off the reader, for example, by using classes in his early examples, and then two chapters later, shows you what a class is and how it's used. Huh?

That being said, the book does cover a wide array of subjects and the author does say that the book's not intended to be a complete guide to everything or anything. It methodically exposes the reader (hopefully at an intermediate VB level) to virtually any subject and technique you might use in developing applications.

Buy this book only as a read-thru-once study if you want to find out the possiblities of VB, and then give it away to goodwill, as you'll never use it again.

This book is wonderful for the intermediate level VB programmer who is looking for new ideas.

The only problem I have with this book is the misleading information in the title and on the cover. But hey, if you didn't flip through the book first, "What the Hell were you thinking?"

Remember this is a book of examples - nothing more, nothing less.

This is a really good book for beginners to Advanced Users. A bit shallow on every topic but touches on classes,error handling, data access object and good graphic routines. do not attempt to use it as reference for how to implement every type of control in your tool box though. Harish P