Customer Reviews

Visual Basic® 6 Bible

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I would have to say that you should stay away from this book if you need specific answers to anything about Visual Basic 6.0 They could have labeled it VB5. There was very little that was covered about the lastest features of VB 6.0 I would have like to have seen more on the Data Envirnonment, MTS, Reporting Engine and other new features. The book is huge but really does not help me learn anything new about VB 6.

I have always loved the Bible books. They are not the best book for abject beginners, but they always offer tips and techniques beyond those found in other books. The real world examples are a blessing.

The bible books offer a lot for both the beginner (although a true beginner will have to work through the examples numerous times to get all of the nuances)and the expert.

The downside to this book is that it was obviously written with a beta version of the VB6 product. While this is not a major detriment, working through some of the example code is a bit painful at times. Fortunately, the examples on the CD are there to help guide through these areas. I cannot fault the writer for this, however, since the sample code is fairly complete and easy to work through.

The biggest bonus to the bible is that it offers real world solutions rather than the normal approach of making applications that illustrate concepts rather than solutions. Depending on how you learn, this will either be a boon or a bane.

This book has the right idea about what topics to cover but doesn't cover them in depth enough. Also the editing is HORRIBLE. For instance they talk about how great ADO is but yet seem to use DAO for everything....Seems lazy to me. Also If you get stuck on any code....its probably wrong in the book. The CD at least has the right code.

I would not recommend this book for any reason. As I followed the code in creating these projects I encountered numerous bugs. No updates are made available for the code in this book. The bugs occur because of this books dependancies on Visual Basic 5 components. This is rather poor for a book that touts itself as being the Bible for Visual Basic 6. Authors and editors should take the time to at least be sure to use the same components included in the version of VB that they are supposedly supporting.

I would reccomend the John Smiley series of books instead. At least his code works and makes for a much more enjoyable read as well.

This is an excellent book for the intermediate or advanced user where users know exactly what they want and just need a quick reference guide. This is not a good book for learning VB6 or specialized topics such as Objects or API programming. Just a great general language resource. A must have for any developer library.

If you want screenshots and useless code and tutorials telling you to "click the ComboBox tool, then click to place your ComboBox," you might like this book. For my part, I prefer SUBSTANCE not screenshots and wizard-like walkthroughs.

Put it this way: if you think that a book telling people to click on the Start menu is a good way to teach Windows, you'd like this book. If you want to know more details, forget it. Look elsewhere and save the trees. The online help that comes with Visual Basic is *way* more useful, both as a reference and as an introduction -- even if you are completely new to programming. For those reviewers that rated the book highly (notice they are all new to programming) I would suggest that, had you used the Help menu, you would have learned faster. I doubt any experienced programmer would disagree with this opinion.

The most I got out of this book was being able to follow the tutorials that implement the various gadgets and gizmos that VB6 has to offer. While these examples and the concepts they illustrate are good (it's what earned my 1 star), it is absolutely horrible when you need it to implement your own programs. If you're looking for a book that you can use as a reference for your own projects, this is NOT it! Here's an example of what I mean.

If you want to know how the combo box control works, for example, you look in the index and find 3 pages on it. The first page (p.79) shows a little blurb that explains what it is. Big whoop!!! Gee that really helps me! The second page listed in the index (p. 86) shows a little paragraph sub-titled "Adding the Combo Box". This tells you basically how to add it as part of the tutorial. That's about it! If I want to know how to use the combo box I have to dig through the book to find the code where it is implemented in the tutorial to see how it is used in that particular example and then hope that it will help me. It's the same for all other controls.

In a nutshell, while the book is decent when it comes to explaining VB6 in it's examples, it falls waaay short when you need to quickly look up info on how to use a particular control independent of any particular program. I have been extremely frustrated every time I pick up the book to go back and refresh my memory on how to use the controls.

My advice, don't do it! Get another book!

This is a great book for those looking to get the most out of VB6 newest features, internet technology and database access. Its examples are straightforward, easy to follow and most importantly, relevant to real world problems. The first few chapters are a bit compact for newbies to programming but if you've done some VB5 or any other programming before and want to cut to the chase, this is the book for you.

I was a complete beginner with Visual Basic 6.0 when I bought the book, but in three months I developed a powerful VB/database application that I never thought I'd be able to handle alone. This book contained everything I needed to know and more!

I tried to follow this book to retrain myself. Unfortunately, the authors or editors did a very poor job of checking for continuity. Forms created in one section were referred to by a different name in the next section where they were used, menu items required in the code were not added in the menu definitions and code sections that the book indicate you should already have added do not exist in the text.

The only thing that save this book from being a total loss was the fact that all code was available on the enclosed CD where missing information could be found.