Customer Reviews

Peter Norton's Guide to Visual Basic 4 for Windows 95

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Amazon's author listing is not right: the authors listed inside the book are Peter Norton, Harold Davis and Phyllis Davis. The Norton book on each VB version has a different set of authors, so it is not clear that the same quality always applies.

A great deal of VB has to do with Forms and Controls, which are discussed but are not my point of view. I like this book because of Chapter 4: Programming in VB. This chapter gives a very concise and clear summary of all the language features under the rubric "What's still BASIC in Visual Basic?" Chapter 4 also includes class modules, and some more details are given later in Chapter 14 in an example that controls Excel from VB. I also appreciated Chapter 12: Error-Handling and Debugging, which explains both coding with the On Error feature of VB, as well as the use of the VB debugging tools.

These items comprise about 1/10th of the book. But because of its age I found this book for much less than its original price, which made the book worthwhile even so.

I found this book...and the discussion of error trapping isgreat, better than I've found elsewhere.

I would recommend this book for studying with instructor, not by yourself. It introduces some of the concepts in a rather quick manner without giving you the in-depth introduction to the topic. I taught couple of people VB and I find that Norton's is very helpful for the students, but as I have mentioned, you need instructor's guidance with it.

Overall I thought the book was ok. It occassionally jumps and makes a simple subject confusing, but it does go into detail in several topics. The book is pretty good if you already have any type of programming experience, but I would not recommend it for someone who has never programmed..get a "Dummies" book and save Norton's for later.

Unless you need work on your typing skills, find another book. The explanations of the code are inadequate to describe the underlying concepts. At many points in the book, a programming technique is introduced via the code examples with no explanation whatsoever. The chapter on linking to 'C' is so poorly written one wonders why they bothered. There are a few nuggets inside of the book, but you'll have to dig and you will need a moderate amount of experience in another language to comprehend the coding examples. Better books are available, such as the "Using Visual Basic" series. Serious VB developers should check out Deborah Kurata's "Doing Objects in Visual Basic 5.0" or anything by Dan Appleman.

Norton's VB4 code examples in this book enables a person with a Basic programming background to quickly gain an intermediate understanding of Object Oriented Programming concepts. Norton leads you through the code examples beginning with detailed explinations of what the code does and progresses from a "beginner" status to an "intermediate" understanding. In the process, he covers many important VB4 keywords, programming techniques, and builds code examples that can be used be used and modified either as building blocks for your own programs or from which to experiment.

I carefully studied Norton's book and examples page by page over a period of about a month, and was able to begin developing my own software thereafter. Only a few advanced topics using database objects and certain OCX controls required the Professional version. I am now ready for advanced topics.

I would expect more from Peter Norton than this book deminstrates. You make about 6 mini applications through the first 4 chapters, but guess what?... You have no idea what you did. Mr. Peter Norton just tells you what code to write, where to write it, and "That's all there is to it!" No, sorry Peter, that's not all there is to it... How bout a little explination of what you are telling us to do? There are no explanations of the code you are instucted to write.(By the way, I am sick of seeing this guys face on everything

This book is not for beginners. I am 13 years old and just finished learnig HTML. I got bored so decided to learn VB. When I bought this book, I couldt understand everything upto chapter 1. Then I lost it. So, in short, if YOU ARE A BEGINNER TO VB, DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. IT IS A WASTE OF MONEY.