Programming Visual Basic 6 (Paperback)

Studying this book and using and learning from the source code examples, libraries, and classes included on the cd-rom is, for me, like a one-on-one with an ideal mentor. I like his tone, his frequent use of sidebar notes and special explanations. He is, I think, by nature an envelope-pushing kind of a programmer and his solutions to many of the ... odd ... lacunae in VB are immediately useful in real-world problem solving. And they are delivered without diatribes against Microsoft or agenda-ranting.

For example, his coverage of the TreeView control, gave me some valuable ideas that I could use right away to solve a problem I was working with in implementing drag and drop.

I've found, to my delight, that this is really about six books in one.

As an introduction and overview of Visual Basic as a programming language it's excellent and I'd recommend it for any programmer who wishes to evaluate Visual Basic's facilities and structure.

As a tutorial on the Object/Class aspects of VB, etc. I found it to be the most lucid writing I've encountered ... and he addresses, with source code examples, polymorphism and inheritance ... areas in VB that have been problematic because VB does not offer true inheritance.

I have only begun to skim and study the detailed section on ADO, but I noticed that his explanation of hierarchical recordsets seemed immediately understandable to me in a way that various articles and white papers I've read have not.

Book number 4 ... I found Balena's approach to explaining ActiveX and COM, dll's, etc. lucid and clear and very helpful. I personally am not at the level where I can grok Dan Appleman's books, and I felt that Balena's focus ... and the gradated source code examples ... are exactly what I need to increase my competence in this area.

And, Book 5 ... I really like Francesco's approach to the new Web features of VB6; there's just enought html content to warm me up to the content on DHTML and he includes his own tools (with source !) for exploring DHTML.

Book 6 ... Distributed applications, ASP, IIS Applications. I hope I can get there, eventually.

What you have in this book is a kind of a "core dump" by an enthusiastic and innovative programmer who wants you to learn what he knows.

Of course, no book is perfect. There are some things on the cd-rom that are mysterious and do not execute as they are obviously designed to do. There is some deficiency in the indexing of the book.

The "heroic" scope of the book does leave you wishing for even more detailed coverage of certain areas like the Windows Common Controls, sub-classing, API call-backs, etc.

The frequent use of re-dimensioning arrays as a solution to problems of the "sparse matrix" type will raise some questions for programmers hell-bent on memory-conservation.

I'm going to be studying and using and having fun with this book and its source code examples for a long, long time. 1250+ pages, 2 megabytes+ of source code : this book has more content than ten of the typical rehashed VB5 books popping out like mangy prairie dogs with VB6 stamped on their foreheads.