Customer Reviews

Visual Basic 6 Certification Exam Guide (Bootcamp All-in-one Certification)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

... but not enough for the exam. This book is great for a relatively inexperienced programmer to quickly expand their knowledge with examples.

Its biggest flaw is that it really is not sufficient, on its own, to prepare for the exam certification. The cover states "Everything you need to pass Microsoft's Visual Basic 6 Certification Exam". The "blurb" on the cover is, in my opinion, overly ambitious and the contents do not fully realise this ambition. If you are interested in the Microsoft Certification, then this book is a useful supplement only. You will need to have another serious reference with this "guide" serving as backup.

If you are inexperienced and starting a new job as a VB programmer this is an excellent way to rapidly ramp up your knowledge and experience and a very useful reference. However, once you are up to speed and want to take your knowledge to the next level, even just for certification, you will then see the limitations of this "All in one" book.

THE BOTTOM LINE - if you want it to rapidly expand your basic VB programming experience this performs well, however, if you do want a complete "VB Certification" book to prepare you for the MCP's, this is DEFINITELY NOT the book for you unless you want it to supplement your study of another book/course.

Although I didn't use this book to study for any exams, I found the book to be an excellent resource on what VB6 was created to do. Overall the problems at the end of the chapters were challenging although sometimes without point like in the Custom ActiveX chapter. I've wasted much time on other introductory texts when I should have bought this one after going through "VB Step By Step" by MSPress which comes free with the sofware. To become proficient in any of the subjects presented in this book, I don't think you have any other choice but to pursue complete books about what this book presented in each of its chapters. A good complete introductory text. I would have named it "VB6, A Beginners Guide To What To Use it For".

I purchased almost 5 books before this and found that It is the best there is. The purpose of having a online customer review is to survey how good this book really is.you will se that the average review never go down to three.

If you are looking for a good book to study for the VB 6 exams, this is not it. This book had so many errors and missed several key components that were on the test. I returned my book and got my money back.

I found this book to be a good reference for all of the new technologies in VB6, but it did not cover some major points that were on the exam.

Missing concepts:

- application deployment (local/network)

- extensive detail on watch expressions

- SourceSafe

These missing details may be found in books for the VB6 distributed applications exam, but are not found in this book.

About four months ago, I decided to try to pursue an MCSD and began to look for resources. Of course I went to Transcender for their practice exams, but I found that they only helped point out my weaknesses and then referred me to sources that were not very helpful. I had trouble digging through all the MSDN CD materials to find the answers. Fortunately, I found the book "Visual Basic 6 Certification Exam Guide". I found it to be well organized and the exam matrix was extremely helpful. I took the desktop test on June 18th and passed by a comfortable margin. I am now studying for the distributed exam and have purchased the book "MTS Programming with Visual Basic" by Scot Hillier. I expect that it will also be essential to my success on the next exam.

The book is excellent! As text books go, this book reads easier than any other I've ever read. It's a great resource.

This book did not cover enough of the package and deployment wizard, nor did it even mention the Treeview controls, which "was" on the test. I would pass on this book. I got more info off MSDN, and that was free.

I found the book to be a satisfactory study guide, with two caveats. First, it should have more info on MTS (this is heavily tested on the Distributed Exam). Second, it should have more info on the Package and Deployment Wizard (this is heavily tested on the Desktop exam)

Bottom Line: I passed BOTH VB6 exams (on the same day) after reading this book and doing no other studying. I didn't bother doing the interactive examples (I hadn't even installed VB6 on my PC when I took the exams).

Background: I have 2 years experience developing enterprise applications with VB. Note that I had already attained VB5 certification before I took the VB6 exams.

Complaint: Don't bash books for typos, poor examples, or bad design if you can't even structure your complaint using proper grammar, complete sentences, etc. It's a disgrace to our profession and does little to demonstrate your ability to judge the offending material. You know who you are.

I'm an intermediate VB programmer and found this book to be really good preparation for the exams.

To quote the acknowledgements page "This book is not an effort to give all of the questions you must memorize to pass the tests.... ....we have taken the liberty to cover areas of Visual Basic that are not likely to be on the exam, but represent knowledge that an expert will need."

This book will teach you almost everything you'll need to pass the exams, but for things like TreeView you'll have to consult MSDN. People's reviews of the books say there's a lot of irrelevant material in the book not on the exam. Who cares? You're getting this extra as a bonus!

There are a lot of exercises you'll have to do to cover all the objectives. Use this book with an exam cram and you'll be sorted.