Customer Reviews

Peter Norton's Guide to Visual Basic 6

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

 

 

My first mistake was to purchase this book at Barnes and Noble.....for $5.00 more...without the benefit of Amazon's Reader Reviews. It was mid-way through chapter 2 when I begain to seriously question.... WHO WROTE THIS THING! The editing errors I ran into previously bothered me, but not to the point of giving up on the book. But the disjointed presentation of the material really got to me in chapters 2, 3, and 4. This book is a classic example of a cut and paste assemblage of not very well written bits of information on VB6. Then I did what I should have done before I bought the book...read the acknowledgements. According to my calculations, Peter Norton did not write any of this book. Michael Groh, who assumes that responsibility, actually wrote only 13 of the 28 chapters (46%) (including 1,3 and 4). I was primarily upset because I purchased the book largely based on Peter Norton's reputation for writing good software AND good books. Regardless of Norton's lack of input, the book should still rise to some base level of instruction. Well, it does do that, but in doing so it also lowers the base.

This book was nothing more than a collection of ambiguous, unorganized "general information" about Visual Basic 6. This book seemed to "wander and meander" from a starting point to an ending point with no discernable focus or objective. It did little more than gloss over most of the important Visual Basic 6 components and concepts; some key topics were hardly discussed at all. It seemed to me that most of the "usable" information contained in this book came directly from the the VB6 Help files. I am tremendously disappointed with this book.

I have to agree with the other not so exceptional reviews of this book. It was informative to me - only because I knew nothing about VB. Once you read the first couple of chapters you get pretty much all you need to understand the VB UI. But then he goes on and on about it covering every control and its function and never really gets into the stuff that interested me. Like umm, CODE EXAMPLES.
To its credit, this book does cover all of the areas that you should know about when developing in VB i.e. COM and DCOM but he doesn't go in depth enough to allow the reader to understand what they are.
This book needs to take the O'Reilly cookbook approach to teaching. It is a good introduction but it only skims the bare surface of what an aspiring programmer would need to get going.
To reiterate, a good intro but if you want to go swimming, try another book and a new swimsuit.

Books actually written by Peter Norton are better than the average computer book, since Norton seems to understand the English language. Unfortunately this book clearly wasn't written by Peter Norton. To top it off, the editing is execrable throughout. Sams should be ashamed, and Peter had better watch it when he puts his name and his picture on a book. This one seriously tarnishes his image.

This is the worst book that I've read about VB6, I'm very impressioned with books from MS Press and The ADO 2.0 Programmers Reference from Wrox. Don't waste your money with this book. It's not presents the new features (ADO and DataReport,...) from VB6.

Out of all the books available, pick any other

This book is fairly good overall, and the two chapters on web development are very well done with clear examples of a useful nature. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an introduction to the subject.

Any book that refers you to the online help that comes with a program time and time again is not worth the money. What did I purchase the book for? If I wanted to peruse the online help to learn the language, I could have saved myself 25 dollars.

Please do not get this book. Practically any other book would beat this one hands down. I am truly disappointed.