Customer Reviews

Visual Basic 6 Complete

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First off, being an IT graduate w/out any knowledge of VB6 but with C++/Java knowledge, I wanted to learn VB6 with little fuss. Secondly, when I saw this book, I was very amazed at the book's thickness at a very affordable price. I immediately got it with minimal page flipping. Btw, its also my first VB6 book.

I went back to have a read. It starts off pretty well with basic intro of the IDE, explainations of the toolbox and so on. The code examples presented were good and easy to understand from a intermediate's point of view. Now, being a complete book, I read it halfway thru, and you would've assume they'd explain some code they used in later chapters.

This isn't the case. HOWEVER it does provide a COMPLETE language reference at the back, so some exploring is required though it shouldn't be hard. Also, this book doesn't exactly flow in the way you would want it to, mainly because its a compilation of different VB6 books of varying difficulty levels.

At times, it skips to different topics too fast, leaving many holes in between.... so be careful. On the plus side, this book does cover many topics, including the Win API, VBSCript, VBA and DB programming. So, it's definitely complete in that sense, but they're NOT completely explained.

So what's the conclusion? JUST GET IT! Regardless of your VB level, you will benefit in some form or another from this book, considering the ridiculous price it offers.

I have finally found a book that progresses at MY rate. I find that other "Teach Yourself" books usualy stick to basics for 50% of the book, and then dable on a couple of advanced features of VB. Hence you usualy can't use a "Teach Yourself" book as a reference guide, even if they do give you somewhat of a solid base in VB.

THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT!!! It explains concepts concisely, clearly and with interest (not dry). This means that many concepts can be conveyed in the shortest space of time. This also allows the reader to progress very quickly to in depth advanced features, which is great if you are already familiar with VB, or other languages.

Because of the in depth coverage of advanced VB features, the book is also a very good reference guide. Because the book is so cheap, it must be one of the best investments a person, or company, can have.

There are only a small number of drawbacks to the book. Most of these drawbacks occur due to the fact that that several books are combined into this book. This means that various writing and code styles appear which takes a little getting use to.

This is definitely one of the GOOD books!!

This is one of those book that likes to hang around your desk (like your cat) while you programming. It makes quite a good reference book on VB 6, and it doesn't cost you an arm and and a leg either. For the content of this book, I give it 4 stars. But consider the price in which it is selling for, it deserves one more star.

After wading through and returning around 8 VB books in the past couple months, it didn't take long to realize this one is quite a value! This book is a pleasure to read and explains nearly everything in detail. After reading only 100 of the 1,000 pages, I had already easily understood many things the other books confusingly presented. I like hands-on learning and this book fits the bill at every turn. Much of the hands-on stuff is cumulative, in that you start with a simple program and keep adding to it. This makes learning the interactivity of VB elements a lot easier. Best value I've seen.

I would like to agree with the general consensus that this is a good book, especially for the price. When facing a wall full of books costing $40 - $50 bucks a wack, it was refreshing to find such an affordable one (frankly, this is a major reason I selected this book).

I did find the differing styles of the various authors disconcerting from time to time. For example, an early chapter teaches the wisdom of using [option explicit] to force declaration of variables, but a later author did not follow this practice, leaving the beginning programmer who believes in using [option explicit] trying to figure out the data type and scope of variables used. While this is probably a good way of learning such things, it can be frustrating when you don't know enough to be sure if the source of a problem is with the variable, or some other problem (see next paragraph).

The code in the book contains some errors and before the neophyte spends too much time pulling out his hair trying to figure out why the hand-entered code won't work, he would be advised to download the sample files from their website and check them against the book.

This books is bits and pieces taken from several others by the same publisher. I've found several of the examples and subjects useful, including those working with accessing databases including Access files from VB. If you like the style of any of these "chapters" you can find the original text and look for THAT full book. The best feature for programmers of earlier Basic language forms is the Reference at the back listing most of the Basic command functions, with syntax and explanations if not examples thereof. That feature has saved me lots of time. If you know Basic from earlier computers, this book will be helpful on that regard alone, as most books twice its price range omit such a reference guide...

I have purchased more than ten books on Visual Basic programming in the last few years. This inexpensive, 1,000 page guide is the best, most concise guide for beginning programmers that I have seen. For the price, you'd be crazy to pass this up.

For my introduction to today's Basic (no longer all caps, I note) and my re-education in programming, I found this to be the best value if you already have the Basic 6 program. If you haven't you might want to try one of the other books, such as Practical Visual Basic 6 by Bob Reselman and Richard Peasley which includes a disk with the Working Model Edition of Microsoft's Visual Basic 6. Professional programmers of course will want to buy the full-blown Visual Basic, but even they might find this manual handy.

I came from the environment of the line numbered GW Basic and even "Shingo" Basic after taking a class in Basic programming at the local junior college in the late eighties. After that I learned QuickBasic on my own. QuickBasic was a programming language developed from Basic that incorporated the structured programming techniques and some of the commands and ideas used in more professional languages like C, and I forget what else. I wrote some moderately complicated programs of eight or nine hundred lines and then I didn't do any programming for years. When I returned a couple of years ago I discovered that what was now the state of the art for the amateur programmer was Visual Basic. I took a look at the program (a stripped down version that came with Word Perfect) and was absolutely flabbergasted. I could not figure out how to even begin writing a program!

So I went to the bookstore and found several shelves of Basic books. I tried one (I don't recall the title) but found it so lacking in information and guidance (for the price) that I actually took the book back the next day and got a refund. Some other books were entirely too advanced and too specialized for my needs. Then I tried this generic title, and with help from doing the exercises in Reselman's and Peasley's book, it brought me up to speed in Visual Basic enough to write a program to keep track of some stock market data that I was interested in.

What this book does not do that I wish a Visual Basic book would do is include an equivalence table in which the old commands from the world of QuickBasic are paired off with the new commands, and a one-for-one comparison of the old and new ways of doing things. This would be very handy for those of us who learned our Basic some years ago. I looked around for such a book but without luck.

Fortunately many things have not changed. The random number generator works the same, for example. The techniques and commands for using sequential files, for another example, are vitually the same. The really startling changes are in the way information is presented on the screen. If you're like me and haven't done any programming lately, you will probably find yourself facing a brand new learning curve here.

This book begins with an introduction to Visual Basic 6 and the concept of object programming in Part I, followed by practical guidance in Part II, and then in Part III introduces the reader to scripting and using Visual Basic for Internet programming. Part IV is Visual Basic for Applications, which I didn't get to, and Part V is a reference. The various chapters are taken from other Sybex publications such as e.g, Steve Brown's Visual Basic 6 In Record Time.

In the old days, the "quick and dirty" way to really learn a programming language was to jump right in with a project and get it to work. However, like the "spaghetti code" techniques of old, such an approach will not work well if one wants to write complex programs. So I found that there is no substitute for laboriously learning a significant portion of the commands and techniques before actually trying to write a program. Writing small programs guided by experts is the best way, and that is why I do not recommend any single book for the beginner. I recommend instead that this book be purchased as complement to another book, again Practical Visual Basic 6 mentioned above would be adequate. That way if one explanation or guidance is not entirely clear, you can have the advantage of another writer's approach.

Bottom line is the Visual Basic program itself, a way to interface and develop programs in concert with Microsoft's Windows that will astonish you with its power. Or at least it astonished this old weekend programmer.

for its price, and the amount of information provided, this book is an absolute must have for anyone who does any sort of visual basic programming. while it does skim over some of the more advanced topics in some places, it does what most other visual basic books do not - provides the reader with an awareness of the advanced topics so that they can then decide whether they wish to pursue those subjects further. with example programs that can be downloaded from the Sybex website ... and heaps of explanations and exercises within the book, it will take you to a whole new level of visual basic expertise.

I've been away from vb for about six months and wanted to find a book to brush up on the subject. This was excellent for that purpose. The only problem I had was that the editing is a little weak. For instance, a variable will be declared but used with a different name in the subsequent code - things like that. If you think there is an obvious mistake, just quit dwelling on it and push on. There are numerous small mistakes that will drive you crazy if you are a perfectionist. If you can live with imperfection :), you will benefit from this book.