said
I bought this book in Year 11 (2000), after reading reviews of it. I was a beginner to programming - not only did this book introduce me to programming, it goes into VB6 in detail. The examples are all useful - not just toy examples. I have created many useful VB6 projects - this is the ONLY VB6 book you need.
Carl said
Perhaps this book would prove useful to an experienced programmer, but for a novice it is not a good choice. Cornell "assumes no previous programming experience", then goes on to write in huge, sweeping generalities without adequate explanations. Also, the code in the book is often written so the reader cannot fathom the type of event the code is associated with, and no explanations are forthcoming in the body of the text.
There really is a lot covered in this book, but unless you do indeed have "previous programming experience", not worth the cash.
Just Mike said
Two cents from a rank amateur/beginning programmer. At the moment, I'm on page 179 of this book and the main problem I have so far is with the way the information is communicated. Personally, I now know that I should have picked up a book that taught VB concepts via small projects and tasks. A "in chapter 1 we'll build a simple tool to get familiar w/ the IDE. In chapter 2 we'll improve our skillset by building a slightly advanced tool to learn about declaring variables, etc." approach would work better for me. Unfortunately, this book doesn't really do that. The concepts here are explained mostly with bits of standalone code. Hopefully, perhaps by page 200, we'll commence with some "learning by doing." Yes, hopefully. In the meantime, I'll grit my teeth and continue with the book, but right now it simply isn't working for me.
said
I should like to point out that the comment above regarding typos is not correct. True the example is missing a parenthesis (which the reviewer misspelled), however the move method DOES NOT require 4 arguments when anyone of the optional 3 are there. The arguments are left, top, width and height. You must specify all arguments that appear in the syntax before the argument you want to specify. For example, you can't specify width without specifying left and top. Any trailing arguments that are unspecified remain unchanged.
steve said
This isn't a bad beginners book. Anyone who needs more 'basic' information than this book probably shouldn't be in the IT industry in the first place.
The book has alot of typos, i.e. missing parantheses in code examples, missing function arguments etc. I've found it to be somewhat troublesome, but you should be able to go to msdn online to figure out the typo. For example on page 487 the move method requires 4 arguments when anyone of the optional 3 are there but he only includes 2. There is also a missing parantheses there as well.
This book does not go into ADO in any kind of depth that is needed. The Murach book, 'VB6 beginner to database pro' does ADO much better. There does seem to be a complete lack of ADO books for VB6. I imagine there are alot for VB.net. If you want this book, you will need another book to learn ADO programming in VB6. Database manipulation is what many people use VB for. However this lack of ADO depth may be because the book went to press before MS finalized ADO (just a guess there).
Don't get me wrong, I thought this book was very informative and helpful, the fact that ADO is not covered in depth is a definite drawback. Also the code examples don't include every example from the book, just the complete programs. There were many code snippets that you could put in blank vb6 project to illustrate something that were not in the downloadable code from osborne. I would have preferred a CD to downloading as well.
8/20/2003 - I hadn't realized this before becuse the book does not cover it at all, but there is a complete lack of coverage of interface classes. I had to go to a new riders book MCSD TRAINING GUIDE: VISUAL BASIC 6 EXAMS for a good discussion of this. Even the mspress book is somewhat confusing on this topic. If you can get this book used than do that. Don't pay full price though, especially since the binding seems to come apart after alot of use.
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