Customer Reviews

Visual Basic Algorithms: A Developer's Sourcebook of Ready-to-Run Code

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This is a late 20th Century book available at a bargain price from Amazon. Its scope is commendable, covering all the important data structures, with an especially good coverage of hashing. The source code is still relevant and useful, and is made readily available on an included floppy disk. Highly recommended.

This book clearly demonstrates why the name Rod Stephens on the cover is enough to sell a book or a product: the writing is smooth and captivating, and he shows an easy command of both the programming language and the programming envriroment. Were I still using even VB 6 (as I know many of you out there are), I'd find this book simply invaluable.

But VB.net changed the game (and the language) significantly and for what appears to be a long time. Therefore, DO NOT buy this book based on the "Ready-to-run Code" claim. Try to run this code on any verson of VB after the dawn of VB.net, and you'll get a jolly complete lesson in handling errors -- at best,

With that caveat understood, I can say that the book is filled to the brim with valuable, timeless algorithms that you can learn to implement in newer verions of VB. To give you an example, the code for a QuickSort in the book calls for recursion, just as any implementation of the quicksort algorithm - in fact, the algorithm itself is recursive. The trick comes in learning how to call a function from within the function itself in later versions of VB. A hint: the error in VB10 tells you that you have a "dimension" mismatch. Considering that the only thing passed to the function that could be causing that problem is the references to the array-to-be-sorted. But you don't want to pass a copy of the array to be local to the new instance of quicksort. Thus, you'd want to pass the whole array: ary(). Works in any version of Microsoft Basic that I curently have, except for VB 2008 and VB 2010. After all, this is an indexed array with arity 2, so the complaint that I'm sending arrays with one too many dimensions seems ridiculous on first (and last)reading: after all, ary() implies a 1-dimensional array, while ary(idx,data) repesents a two-dimensional array. And, yes, there are a whole lot of issues peripheral to this, like am I passing by value or by ref, why not use a global variable (yuck!), and so on. That's a sampling of what I got from the MSDN help system.

Turns out that the solution is simple, and I was on the right track to begin with: I needed to just pass ary as a parameter - no parentheses, no other terms or modifiers. And it works. But the recursion code does not look like the recursion code for VB4.

If you need to learn about the classical algorithms, and time is of the essense, I'm sure that the book you want will be coming out "real soon now." But, if you've got the time to translate VB4 solutions into VB 2010 solutions, well, maybe you're the one writing that new version of the book.... You'll certainly learn more about the algorithms and your copy of VB than you could in any one other book. And that's not a bad deal, if you've the time.