Customer Reviews

Programming in Visual Basic 2008

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is a pretty horrible book. The end of the chapter hands on programming cases suck, they tend to just go and not really explain what and why. Also there are so many errors in the code, you either have to figure out what is missing or give up, which wastes more of your time. I am sure there are many better books than this. I had to use this for a class and it is not worth the HIGH amount i had to pay. It is sort of like the author had ADD or something, the content bounces around and you never get a full explanation of what is going on. Many people in my class complained about the same thing. This book sucks

I am not going to repeat the exact words of all who have disliked this book as I agree with all of the other examples given by reviewers, jumpy, confusing, missing info, etc. This book along with my instructors use of short cut words for commands has me totally lost. I believe that to get thru this class I might need to purchase a better rated book for explanation.

I'm taking a beginning Visual Basic course and this is our textbook. The book jumps around from topic to topic and doesn't actually show you what anything is doing. It's not chronological, so it's not like you can even follow the book, type in the code and get something to work. It's all very random and meaningless. When I need to figure out what something does, the book doesn't even explain it well. Also, the Case Studies the end of each chapter are USELESS! It shows you how to create the user-interface AND it gives you all of the code. Talk about a no-brainer??? You don't have to use your brain in order to do the homework, which means you aren't learning ANYTHING! So, now I've been given the "calculator" challenge. I'm completely clueless, because the book taught me nothing so far! If I could give this book a 0 stars, I would!

I unfortunately had to use this textbook for my Visual Basic course and this textbook has got to be one of the worst textbooks that I have ever used in any of my courses and especially in any of my computer courses.

Here are some of MAJOR issues I had with this textbook:
1) too many errors - for a technical textbook to have this many errors is unacceptable. Chapter 7, 8, 9, all had missing lines of code but throughout the book, the authors consistently had minor codes that was wrong or missing from the examples.

2) the examples in the chapters didn't make sense. I would find the examples to be confusing because the authors would at times, present 3-4 examples but it was hard to decipher which example correlated to the discussion.

3) when working on the case studies, I would refer to the chapter to see if I could get the answer but the authors left elements out in the chapter to help complete the case. For example, in one of the chapters, there was a discussion about coding for websites, chapter 9 I believe. Well there is a wide gap of missing information that the case required but was not mentioned in the textbook. The chapter would discuss how to code a checkbox but the case asked you to code for a radiobutton.

4) an overall presentation of material that skipped around and the material seemed as if it was disorganized and scattered.


If you have programming background, you may be able to get by using this book but for a newbie or someone who is wanting to learn visual basic programming on their own, this is NOT the book for you. I would not have been able to succeed in this course if it wasn't for my professor.

This textbook by Anne Boehm has a high rating by a lot of people and overall, this textbook helped to understand the course a lot better. You can even purchase this on Amazon!Murach's Visual Basic 2008

I was taking an online class and this was my assigned textbook. This book is lousy for new programmers. It doesn't have good examples or explanation, and it is jumpy in topics and organization. I am so disappointed with this textbook that I will probably be better off learning this programmin language on my own with a better book.

Avoid this over-priced 676 page compilation of useless and confusing information. The book provides an abundance of useless code examples that try to re-enforce (without success)the often confusing and poorly written text. There are better books available at 1/3 the price of what this pile of garbage cost. The only benefit of this book is that the authors names are clearly printed on the cover which will be a reminder to never recommend or purchase another title from them. Save money, time and fustration by avoiding this book and the "New" 2010 version which is just as useless and confusing.

First courses in Visual Basic cover the same fundamental topics, so the textbooks follow suit. Furthermore, since the programming activities are also generally the same, there are few differences in that area. This book is no exception. Therefore, the only differentiating characteristic that VB textbooks have is the quality of the exposition and the figures/diagrams.
This book ranks among the best in terms of the exposition yet ranks much lower than others regarding the quality of the diagrams. Unlike other books where the diagrams are color screenshots of what appears on the screen, in this book all of the illustrations are gray. While this is generally not an issue, it certainly can be the case when the topic is the properties of the object that are colors or when color is significant in the display of the form. As a veteran of teaching VB, I can attest to the fact that some beginning students find this important.
Therefore, while I consider this book to be more than adequate as a text, there are circumstances where it is demonstrably inferior to others that utilize color images.

I found this book to be a horrible learning tool. I am a programming major and keep most of my programming books for future reference, but sent this one back. Not only does it have errors but it does not explain in enough detail. It basically says to do this do this, but there is no why. I find it hard to learn something when I don't know why. It also made trouble shooting a pain since I really didn't understand what I was doing. I passed my class with an A, but no way would I be able to use this knowledge in a real world environment.

The order was received prior to the delivery date and I was impressed by the commitment for excellent customer service

I've read so many reviews of this book and everybody says it is hard to follow or ... I think this book is excellent and makes visual basic fun to learn, granted I've had a little programming experience before entering this class. I took an online programming class with Python through MIT and compared to what I had to read for that, Programming in Visual Basic 2008 by Millspaugh is a picture book.