Customer Reviews

Simply Visual Basic 2005 (2nd Edition)

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After all the hype about Deitel books I was really looking forwards to reading this book. If you are learning VB at home on your own then this book is a waste of time. This is a college exercise book. There are a lot of examples to practice on at the end of each chapter but there are no answers. The authors assume you have a tutor to fall back on. In fact, you have to be a tutor to get the answers. This makes about a third of the book useless for people who are learning at home on their own. The authors have perfected the art of making rather simple programming concept into very long winded confusing concepts. I've read other VB books that explain the same concepts in a few paragraphs, not several pages like this book does. For a book of this size there are not really many computer concepts explained.
The only thing I liked about this book was that it had colour screen shots. There are several other good VB books out there for beginners that cost a third of this, are half the size and will teach you many more programming concepts than this book.
Unless you are on a college course that makes you buy this book save your money as there are much better books out there for learning VB.

The bottom line: This book is poorly, very poorly organized.

There are instructive exercises, but often one idea is not followed through on. The book is very much a disjointed series of design exercises. The topics do not seem to build sequentially.

And then there are the instructions to type some certain code, and the only place to see what code to type is in an accompanying illustration, where the code is set in a tiny font. Very poorly thought out!

Considering the price, you would think that this was a worthwhile book. NOT!

Don't waste your money, because it is a wasteful expenditure. Not worth it!!

I purchased this book Fall of 2008 for my Visual Basic class at the local college. I did fine the first semester because my teacher was able to explain all of the concepts as she went through the tutorials in the book.

When I started my independent study Spring 2009 for ADVANCED Visual Basic my teacher had my keep the same book. I have been expected to go through the other half of the book alone with no assistance from her and I have found it very difficult to make it through the semester.

This book does not explain concepts in an organized manor. Each chapter is rather a "tutorial" where you go through and create an application. (such as an application that calculates your car payment for you) and gets more difficult from there. Although the book gives you all of the code to make the applications, I am walking away with no "real world" understanding of how to sit down and make my own programs because the book just gives you code; it does not explain how the code works or the reasons why behind what you are doing.

One of the worst VB learning books I have come across, as its more confusing to a beginner than needs to be, as they shift from one area to another and the code itself is sometimes incomplete which does not help because there is little text to understand exactly why one thing was done. I recommend getting a more comprehensive book.

I sued this book with "Visual Basic 2005 How to Program (3rd Edition)", so it was complementing.
This book (as other "Simply" books) is more oriented on GUI. It has tutorials one follows step-by-step. When used in conjunction with VBHtP (mentioned above), it is mote fun than using boring black and white MS-DOS window. So this is positive side of this book.
The negative side, is (1) if you use it with VBHtP, information in two books (obviously) overlaps, and you find yourself reading same thing twice. But if you use it by itself, there is a prospect that you will need to consult some other source on VB to help you with some exercises. (2) There are typos, and if it is yur first ever programming class, you could get mad over little thing, thinking you doing everything right and it still won't work. I went through about 2/3 of the book and I remember about 3 typos/errors in the code. Now, those are resolvable if you compare code provided in the middle of the tutorial with the entire code given at the end. So, if you stuck, check both places where code found: particular section of the tutorial and the final code at the end of the tutorial. One of them is correct.

As far as the quantity of data is concerned I think VBHtP has more information, but Simply VB presents it more interesting with more GIU components, and tutorial driven approach.