Visual Basic Books

If you have no Visual Basic experience but have a desire to learn about the language, you'll find Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6 useful. Furthermore, you'll find it useful for more than a week--the author covers advanced problems as well as language fundamentals. He begins with some introductory information about the development environment's interface and moves on to key aspects of the language, such as graphical controls, variables, arrays, loops, and other control structures. The book then explores different kinds of resources, one at a time, before ending with a series of case studies.

Throughout, Wright's style is clear and informed. He often inserts a program's source code into his commentary and then proceeds to examine it in depth. This Talmudic approach proves quite enlightening. His examples aren't overly academic, either. For example, you'll find a database-aware program to manage a library's collection in the text. Indeed, database programming--the bread and butter of professional Visual Basic programmers--is covered very well.

Coverage of ActiveX control creation, one of Visual Basic 6's most important features, isn't as lavish as that of other topics, but real-life Visual Basic development still focuses on stand-alone applications, after all. --David Wall

Customer Reviews:

Saima (saima_k_2000@hotmail.com), a student from Pakistan, January 19, 2001,
Visual Basic 6.0
This book is very useful for the implementation of the database in Visual Basic.Telling the user how you would implement the loops and checks in it to make the powerful database.

Steven (Rosta32@hotmail.com), CS student in Columbia U., December 9, 2000,
The worst programming book, ever
Before picking this book up I have had C, C++, and Java experience; I have also played around with VB on my own. The book starts out very slow introducing the reader to the computer, etc. Then it just takes off not explaining anything in detail, but just brushes on topics while explaining other topics; new things are introduced in examples for unrelated topics. For example, bitwise operations are introduced in an example for List controls. The first thing I expected the book to do is explain controls' properties, it didn't even do that. After briefly explaining a topic the books presents long, confusing examples that introduce new topics w/o explainations. The language is very friendly and non-technical, which seemed good to me in the beginning, but after a few chapters the corny jokes and cliches became annoying. The book also makes a HORRIBLE reference manual, many of the subtle concepts are not covered and the Index contains the least information of all programming books I've seen, it has more references to their examples and problems than VB. If want a book that throws a lot of examples at you w/o explaining anything in detail and makes a horrible reference manual for when you're actually programming, buy this book.

Lorinda, a programmer, new to Visual Basic., November 16, 2000,
Excellent beginner's book
This book provides a great introduction to writing applications in VB. The code samples and explanations are excellent. I would recommend this book to anyone who is new to VB and object oriented programming. Although VB is not truly OOP, it helps you to learn the basic principles.

Also recommended: Microsoft Visual Basic Professional Step by Step (Microsoft Press) Beginning Visual Basic 6 Database Programming (Wrox)

A reviewer, a college student, September 18, 2000,
Beginner
This book jumps around, and teaches what seems to be obvious first, then jumps straight into the 'hard stuff' without background. I am having to use other books as well to help me.

Chris Jasen, an NT Consultant, February 9, 2000,
Superb Introduction to VB6
Extremely good introduction to VB 6. I have a CS degree, but haven't programmed in 10 years, before Object Oriented programming caught on. This book helped me to understand the concepts of OO programming. Everything else is good too. Highly recommended.