Visual Basic 6 from the Ground Up [Paperback]

Well I had great hopes when I bougt this book 'Open this book a novice and finish a pro' I already had some grounding in VB from programming Excel, and hoped to learn VB6 fully. I have to say that Gary made an excellent attempt to cover all the topics for VB6 but unfortunately the topics were very wordy and at times very confusing, especially when the code in the book has typos in it, for someone who has some knowledge of VB already they should be able to figure out what the code in the book was supposed to read, and of course you can download the code from the web site. It could be accepted for pages and pages of code, but for some parts of the code where it run to less than 10 lines this can only be described as very sloppy.Comments through out the code were sparce or non existent! and although the code in places was explained in the book it would have been better placed in the code. Some topics that were covered might just as well have not been covered at all, for all the information that was written for them, in particular Error Trapping, maybe a bit more time spent on this area would have been very useful, as would the topic on OOP, which focused more on creating instances of controls and forms in an OOP fashion, rather than spending more time on covering OOP Design and coding practices, Databases were covered but not really enough time was spent on this subject either, Perhaps instead of devoting topics on building web browsers? (who want another web browser anyway) more time could have been spent on these other topics and certainly more coded examples would have been useful. It seemed that you lost interest or rushed the chapters from about 11 onwards as the information was sparce and it may just as well not have been included. for the money you could spend on this book, could buy two books, in particular VB6 in Record Time & Pure VB6, for the cost of these two books, they will give you far more information, and teach you in more detail what this book tries to teach you, for around the same price. Verdict Save your money unless you are already an expert in VB6 and spend it on the above two books I mentioned, they will teach you more than this book will.

Visual Basic 6 from the GROUND UP is a curious book. It has 900 pages of beginner/intermediate text on how to progam Microsoft Visual Basic 6. This book encompasses a wide range of topics and this is one of its strengths: it is thorough. The early chapters introduce you nicely to the environment. I found the presentation quite unusual, there are grey horizontal separators, dashed lines and notes/tips/cautions and I was always wondering what would come next. Early on you notice the continual use of brackets, all the way through this book there is some text in brackets. I found this a little irritating but its Cornell's style. More irritating as you delve further into the book are the typos. For a book about programming this is a major hindrance. Syntax errors, variables which are not declared and such like will crop up if you type in some of what is printed. The beginner is put off balance by this. Occasionally a piece of code is presented and the author tells you there is a suble error and see if you can figure it out. I don't think this is a good idea in a book, which many beginners will read. Seemingly unavoidably in books on programming we can't avoid the "see the section on ... at the end of this chapter". It's not too bad in this book. The book does contain much useful information on programming, the quality of explanation is excellent in some areas but it also falls down in others. Cornell knows his stuff and on the whole explanations are reasonably good its just sometimes things get tangled. This of course is not helped by Visual Basic itself which can be confusing. This book also gives lots of good advice about Visual Basic which will help avoid many of the pitfalls. This book gives me the impression it was rushed out, the errors the funny formatting, there was surely a deadline to be met that caused a rush.

For - Thorough
Lots of useful tips
Large scope
Nice introduction for beginners
Against - Typos
Anomalies
Some poor explanations

This book was the one that really got me back on tracks with Basic. Not having programmed basic since DOS 5.0 and qbasic, this book teached me how to make kick-ass apps for Windows in VB. Now I've made web browsers, IRC clients, SQL server/client apps and much more. Just plain great for beginners.