Customer Reviews

Visual Basic (Bootcamp) Certification Exam Guide

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

 

 

I didn't like this book at all.

Lots of errors, not even close to the amount of material needed, way too disorganized. The authors are terrible book writers. It's just a mess.

The authors should be ashamed. What a disaster their boot camp must be.

Highly UN-recommended.

These guys do stuff at VBits and run a traveling circus that they call VB BootCamp, hence the book title. They never go beyond code snippets that are for the most part directly out of the online help. This book is like their road show, if your non-programmer manager goes to their classes or reads this book, he/she may get a brief and confusing overview of VB5. But, if you are really interested in becoming certified don't bother with this dirt. Like all of their "examples", everything is weak or touched on so lightly as to be a confusion. They don't build on anything, it seems like somekind of random romp through the help facility. The publisher who decided to print this stuff should be put in a room with Dan Mezick and stuffed full of bananas. What comes out the other end is exactly what they put into this book.

As an intermediate/adv VB developer I was interested in focusing on getting my certification. This book is no help at all. The title is very misleading. It should be called Introduction to Visual Basic 5.0 for Beginners ONLY. I will not buy another book written by Mezick or Hillier. This is the worst book I have ever purchased. I would have given it 0 stars, but it was not an option.

This may be a usable book for someone new to VB5 but it is certainly NOT A 'CERTIFCATION EXAM GUIDE'. The page count, 486 pages, is also very small. The fundamentals of chapter 1 say it all 'What You Need to Know' - 'You need to be familiar with using Windows applications like Word or Excel before you start this topic. You also need to be a programmer'.

It's obvious McGraw Hill has titled this to 'sell' considering it's title this is a WORTHLESS book. I'm not wasting my time on it and will certainly not be buying any future McGraw Hill books.

The book was written well although it continually points the reader the either the help file or the online books. Most of the information/instruction that I got form this book came from the authors pointing me to the help file. If you want a book to tell you what parts of the helpfile and on line books to read for the test then get this book. Otherwise DON'T GET THIS BOOK

Why is this book titled "Certification Exam Guide"? Should be "Random Notes on VB5". I like the book's format and style. The author starts each chapter with a synopsis, overview and objectives. Too bad each chapter if literally filled with errors - both technical and typographical. I can accept an occasional error but when the author completely confuses topics (ie. "subclassing" with "superclassing") then I can't feel confident in the material. I took the MCSD Exam for VB5 and I can honestly say that this book would have been a liability more than an asset! Hey, authors, the default recordset type is not dbOpenTable - it's dbOpenDynaset! (This was a question on the exam.) I've emailed the publisher over 20 times to inquire about an errata to the book but no reply. Take this into consideration when you are looking at purchasing this book.

This book is very hard to be rated. It does discuss and encourage the reader to explore a lot of useful details in VB. among all the VB books I have read, for example, this one is the best in explaining and showing the scoping rules. also the exercises after each chapter are pretty good. However, this book's quality is poor. When I was reading the book, thank goodness I already knew VB, otherwise, I would pull off all my hair in order to make some sense out of the book. A lot of information was wrong, a lot of pictures were misplaced and some exercises left unanswered. Maybe that is the whole idea of "bootcamp." After all, this book would be an excellent resource for experienced VB programmers, however, it would be a nightmare for those who try to learn VB from this book.

I don't know what this book was written about, but it wasn't Visual Basic, and it certainly doesn't prepare anybody for an exam, nor does it cover any version of Windows that Microsoft ever released. Perhaps if they learned to read so they could edit it... For example, page 82; why does the Printer object have a PopupMenu method? This book was a joke.

I have a H.B.Sc. in physics, have taught at the high school level and came to this language already knowing C. I can't really comment on this book's suitability as VB study guide because I haven't tried the exam yet, but I am prepared to endorse it as a concise and useful introduction to the language.

As many reviewers have pointed out, this book has some typos and some minor coding errors, but the content, style and exercises more than make up for the lack of editing. Snippets of code are used to illustrate the major ideas before things are tied together with an exercise. I found it to be a pretty quick and painless read and learned much more from this book than the first one i tried. It may not be a certification guide but I feel it is an excellent intoduction that will get you programming in vb5 very quickly.

As other readers have commented, this book needs editing, contains errors, and will not teach you most of what you need for the MS Certification exam. It really is an intro to VB. But what I DID like about the book is that their "Check It Out" exercises got me USING VB, rather than just reading about VB. This emphasis on using the product as you read the book is more effective than most books programming books, where it's easy to read, forget half of what you read, and never really use the product.