Rating: 
Summary: Wouldn't recommend this book
Review: This book covers databases in a very perfunctory manner and doesn't seem to mention the packaging and deployment wizard. I was not very impressed with it at all. I shall add books with the word 'step' on the cover to my list of books to avoid (along with any book with 'Days' in the title).
Rating: 
Summary: Shows you how easy VB is!
Review: I came to this book as a very advanced user of Word, Excel & Powerpoint for financial businesses, but with no programming experience. This book is so easy to follow, so encouraging, that I cannot imagine anyone not doing some good work after using it. After just doing the first 2 exercises, I started clicking around in VBA and already created some very useful stuff for my employer that looks impressive but was really a snap to do. Now I'm going through the whole book step by step and it's all so doable! He also talks about error handlers in a way that anyone using VB should regard. In that I mean I've used quite a few custom VB & VBA templates & programs written by others with some annoying quirks that I now see could have been easily avoided, with a little attention. Maybe they should've glanced at this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for beginners.
Review: The book provides an excellent step-by-step education on VB for beginners who may have no programming experience at all. Because the author really knows what he is trying to teach, the reader can easily get the point following the line of thoughts in the book. The concepts and terminologies are well organized in the book, so that readers will not get confused. Moreover, the words and expressions are simple and concise, and you will not get misled to bulky discussions like some wordy books. This is really a 5-star book on VB 6.0.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!!
Review: This guy really knows his stuff. This text is very easy to use and to the point. A good investment!
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book for beginners +
Review: I used to read the VB 5.0 step by step book. I thought it was a junk. And I happen to pick up VB6 and I found this book valuable. Why? It all depends on the reader's motiviation and discipline. Right now, my job allows me to sit down and go through "step by step". Beginners may not understand "why" we do certain things. That's why I said it's great for beginners "+". Veteran of course feel bored. Some tiny mistakes on book but you can spot it. We don't expect a Nobel Prize winner not writing mistake on blackboard!
Rating:
Summary: Easy to read and understand
Review: Am new to VB, and read another book before this MS book. Am very surprised how easy to read and actually understand this MS book is. Compared to other related books by MS, was this one very much of value for myself. I understood right the way how the structure is of VB and all about the programming itself. I can recommand this book for new VB user.
Rating:
Summary: Very very basic, it doesn't go into depth on anything
Review: This book might be alright for the beginner but, if you are experienced in any other programming language just photocopy the 3 pages you might need, and buy a good book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but flawed
Review: On the positive side: The book is oriented towards beginners, and does not assume prior programming knowledge (but does assume that you know your way around Windows). The lessons are fairly clear, and the author provides plenty of coding examples on the CD.On the negative side: Although Halvorson uses standard naming conventions for objects (with three-character prefixes), he does not use the current standard naming conventions for variables. Instead, he uses the old-fashioned BASIC conventions, so a string variable is named Message$ instead of strMessage. (Microsoft recommends against this practice). And as the reviewer from Nashua pointed out, Halvorson doesn't assign types to his string and integer variables, instead leaving them as the default variant type (a bit sloppy, won't really affect small programs or databases but could be a time/space-waster in large-scale projects). If it weren't for the less-than-ideal programming practices Halvorson uses in his lessons, I'd recommend this book with more enthusiasm. For absolute beginners, it might be better to start with Smiley's intro to VB, and then go through Halvorson's (while correcting the naming conventions and variable types in the exercises!) for more detail. Bear in mind that both are learning books rather than reference books; you'll need to pick up something like "VB and VBA in a Nutshell" (from everyone's favorite geek publisher O'Reilly & Associates) to have at hand while doing more advanced stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Good For Beginners But Not For Programmers
Review: When I was looking for a book to help me get started with Visual Basic, I searched Amazon's website for the most highly rated one. Unfortunately, much to my dismay, I have found this book to be far too elementary for the things that I want to do with VB. I think that it is really intended for someone who is a complete novice in programming, because if you have any experience at all you will be sorely disappointed with the limited scope of the contents in this book. Nevertheless, there are some useful chapters that can come in handy, even for the more experienced programmer, so I'm giving this book a lukewarm endorsement.
Rating:
Summary: Not Quite Ready for Vegas
Review: I am in perfect agreement with the Nashua reader below. I purchased this book within the Microsoft Deluxe Learning Edition for Visual Basic 6.0 As far as programming goes, it seemed to leap into the "how" without first telling you the "why". And although I soon found myself writing code for cute slot machines and so forth, I didn't at all find it useful in terms of writing my own comprehensive code. I did learn a good deal as far as controls and interface...designing, that is. But I don't feel I got my money's worth at all in terms of learning any useful Visual Basic programming.
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