Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself More Visual Basic 6 in 21 Days (2nd Edition)

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2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

The book suffers from quite a few errors: I found quite a few instances of wrong references to illustrations in the book (The illustrations referred to in the text are not in any way related to the text itself). This is very unfortunate: trying to learn a new programming language is already hard enough without the additional confusion caused by these mismatches.

I have to absolutely agree with the other reader reviews here. THis is absolutely the very worst book of its kind that I've ever tried to use. Anyone who buys this book is simply asking for unnecessary headaches. And to the author, Lowell Mauer, if you're reading this, please oh please consider another line of work.

this could possibly be the worst book I have ever read. letters and numbers printed randomly for several hundred pages would have been more informative than this book. i would rather eat a rotten egg off of some spoiled beef tainted with mad cow disease than read this book.

I wish I had read the others' review about this book before I started to read this book. There are just too many editial erros in it. For example, Figure 1.22 refers to Hierarchical FlexGrid Control but it actually shows Tooltiptext; Figure 1.23 mentions Data Environment Designer but the illustration is about the form of file copying. If you copy and paste the code listing of 1.1, it wouldn't run because it introduced "i" that did not declared. I wonder if the author and the editor even ever read the final proof once, because there are so many obvious errors if you are an experienced VB user. But if you are trying to learn VB, it wouldn't help because it's so confusing.

This book is easily the most disappointing programming book I read so far. I couldnt get past day 5 b/c it was just too painful to read.

I spent almost more time debugging the errors and figuring out the mismatched outputs in the book than learning visual basic.

From what I read, this book is detrimental to a beginning programmer b/c it will shoot down programming confidence.

This book shouldn't have made it past the editor.

Forget trying to correlate text with pictures. The book contains lots of screen-prints which supposedly tie-up with the text. For example, the caption for the figure 10.15 is "Adding a combo box to the data-entry form". You guessed - not a combo-box or a data-entry form in sight.

This book is not worth the paper it is printed on, it has literally hundreds of errors. I have emailed the publishers but have not yet received a reply (and don't expect to receive one).

This book should be withdrawn from sale immediately.

This text is so poorly edited that I am having a hard time understanding anything. The errors occur everywhere. Nearly every graphic is wrong, and a great deal of the examples do not illustrate what the header specifies. Don't waste your time or your money.

This is an incredibly poor book, which has made me consider future titles in the series more carefully.

In addition to the numerous errors described in other reviews, the code is more seriously flawed. Some of the examples are painfully incomplete. It is one thing to suggest that the reader should now have the knowledge to provide their own code following the guidelines of the example application, but when the example doesn't provide a complete framework it is more difficult, especially when the author suggests that he just did.

The chapters are poorly organized, really just collections of points. For example, Day 1 is alleged to be about writing professional applications, begins with a 4 page discussion of some issues related to that, and then turns into a review of some new features in VB6, with no apparent logic as to which ones.

The bulk of this text appears to be a rehash of an older VB5 book, because in places the nomenclature is clearly outdated. In others, the current version is referred to as VB5.

The book also overlaps with elements of the first, TYVB6in21D. It certainly does not simply extend the first, as I assumed when I bought the bundle. Where it overlaps, it is clearly inferior.

Run, don't walk.

This is the worst book I have ever read. I could not see the logic of the writing. It also contains too many editorial errors. Don'y buy it.

I was disappointed with this book because it had so many incorrect illustrations it was hard to follow. For example on p38, the illustration shows some incomplete form but the text refers to it and describes it as a web browser created by vb 6. I have used a lot of Sams Teach yourself books and they were all very well written. I also have to agree with some of the other people that wrote the reviews regarding the topics covered in this book. It covers points and new features but doesn't do it in any orderly form. I have used VB for many years so I kind of managed to figure some things out on my own. But for beginners it would be difficult. I have to admit, that it has some good things in it too.