Customer Reviews

Visual Basic 2008 For Dummies

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

 

 

While a decent Dummies book in essence, the problem lies in it's target. The main focus on the book is VB 2008 Professional Edition. I find it hard to think of a common situation where a user would have full access to VB'08 PE, a $650 package at least, and be on a "dummies" level. For a user to have a need of this book, they would normally be on an entry level. Most entry level user's would be using VB'08 Express. There are a lot of features he highlights that are not available in this edition. This makes this book of little use for a lot of the "dummies" demographic.

It does have a lot of useful information in it. With some trial and error and copious use of the Help files, you can adapt this book to the VB Express edition. I have to give it 2 stars for that. I wish I had found another resource instead to waste my money on.

This book is designed to get you going quickly in Microsoft Visual Basic 2008. It's not a reference, it's probably not for the complete beginner, and true dummies probably won't be up to this level. Rather it is an entertaining tour for those with some modest programming experience on how to get going quickly in VB 2008. If you are a self-starter, this is the book for you!

The author packs the book full of useful "how to's." Rather than trying to answer every question you could possibly ask about VB 2008, the author focuses on the most essential tools you will need. Once you get the basic idea of how a given tool or approach works from the book, you have what you need to apply these tools and/or approaches to other problems you encounter in VB 2008.

I usually do not buy books for Dummies but at a ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Symposium I heard Bill Sempf speak and after reading his book; I found things in his book that were explained better and with more detail than in the five professional books I bought. I have been programming for 32 years with many different computer languages and now I am working on Visual Studio 2008. I liked the history and the why things are the way they are explained in this book.

Dean Liming MBA

The book is written in English rather than computerese, which I appreciate. The inclusion of code examples is critical to learning, and this book's got them. Glad I've got this one.

I reached page 66 and could not endure another sentence. The author endlessly expresses his adoration for VB2008 and explains what he is going to explain further down tin the book so that by page 66 I had learned some things, but certainly not 66 pages worth. I'm getting another book.

If you don't understand anything in vb this is a very good book. i new more than i thought but i went from cover to cover in a weekend. this book is very good.

The "Hello World!" project went fine. I'm moving from VB6, so I don't expect there to be much difficulty, but figured it would be worth the cost. I haven't done much with it yet.

I needed to take a visual basic course as an elective. Yeah, like a foreign language to a nurse. This book went slow, and really showed in "baby steps" the process, I couldn't have made it through the course without it.

If your expectation is that you're going to be able to read this book from beginning to end like a novel and find yourself able to write Word or Excel from scratch, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's like taking a semester of weekend classes in Biology 101 and expecting to discover the cure for cancer.

If you were interested in bodybuilding as a beginner, would you balk at having to endure muscle soreness and having to sweat? If you're going to butt heads with the topic of programming, you're going to get a headache. There's just no way around it.

Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies cannot save you from that process. Nothing can. This isn't the Matrix where you can zap this information into your brain in an instant

Let's start with an example: If someone were to write a book called "Neurology for Dummies," (I don't know whether there is such a book, and it doesn't matter.) a purely descriptive digest of information about neurology: history, basic fundamentals, current state of science, etc., it would be a very difficult task. There is a LOT of information, and all of it is very advanced. To write it so that anyone with a normal level of intelligence but zero familiarity with the subject (a "dummy," in other words) can get reasonably up to speed on the topic would take a lot of skill, patience, and expertise on the subject matter.

The difficulty, then, in writing a book called "Neurosurgery for Dummies," would be tenfold. Whereas in a descriptive book, the reader can get by with a sketchy retention of the subject matter, and skip parts that hold no interest, an instructive book requires that the reader/student follow the prerequisite material and retain it.

With a programming language, there is no "Neurology," only "Neurosurgery." A descriptive book on Visual Basic would be near useless. So it's the much more difficult challenge or nothing at all.

Sempf valiantly rises to meet the task, and for the most part, achieves the objectives. When I read this book, I got the sense that he really is aware of the difficulty of the material, as well as the perception a reader would have of it encountering it for the first time. (Compare this with my review for "VBA for Dummies," a book I despised, written by someone who has nearly no awareness of his reader.)

There are varied and immense topics related to and/or required for a fully functional knowledge of Visual Basic programming: object-oriented programming, the Windows operating system and object model, Web technology and browser compatibility, different Visual Studio editions, comparisons to the other languages supported by Visual Studio, etc. It is simply impossible for a beginner-friendly, readable volume to penetrate all that breadth of information with complete depth.

Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies is not meant to be a comprehensive tome. Sempf acknowledges this, and specifically points out in several sections of the book where he cannot expound further on a topic than the introduction he gives it. Most of the time, he helpfully points to external resources (books, web sites) for the reader to explore that branch of knowledge further on his own.

Take the book for what it is, an introductory tour and basic instruction for a programming tool and language, and a springboard for further study into other related, interesting topics. Skip around, use the index, bookmark your page and go online to study tangents. (Definitely go to vbfordummies.net, where errata and other information are posted.) Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies will help you get a solid foothold on the basics so you'll know what else you need to know (Before reading this book, I hardly knew what I needed to know!), in a friendly, thoughtful style.

While the terrain may be rough and you'll have to endure scrapes, and he can't go to the promised land with you, with "Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies" Bill Sempf will steer you toward your destination and take you to the point where you can continue on your own.

Disclaimer: I only have downloaded the kindle sample, but what I've seen makes me far less likely to buy the book for the kindle. I may check out the hardcopy at my local B&N. If so, I'll update this review. One of my pet peeves is books that are hastily (and badly) ported to the kindle format without bothering to reformat as necessary to make the book work well on the Kindle.

Problem #1

You need look no further than the book's title on the search page. Search Kindle for "visual basic". See the botched code in the title which is plainly visible on the book's listing, as well as in the book title list on the Kindle itself.

If someone can't even get the basic translation to kindle's .azw format right, what can you expect from their book on programming? This screams "sloppy slapdash port to get the book into kindle format ASAP". Supporting this are the characters within the introduction which the Kindle does not recognize.

Problem #2:

There are several versions of VB 2008: professional, standard, and the free express version. The author uses the standard version, not the free express version, and states that some of his examples can't work using the express version (although he has modified some on his website to work with VB 2008 express). It's VB 2008 FOR DUMMIES. NOT for professional programmers. Which version do you think the target audience is mostly likely to own?