Rating: 
Summary: Size is not every thing
Review: I picked this book over other beginner's books because the others I compared seemed to be for beginners with no clue of what they are doing.I've read upto chapter 4, and I noticed that some the explanations are verbose. Several examples in the book can be illustrated with one good example. I can drag on and on about how this book can be more concise. If you like such a writing style, you will feel right at home when you read this book. But I need to stop writing my comment becase I still have 1000 tedious pages to go. FYI, I am familiar with VC++ but not with VB, so my comment might not be applicable to those with different background.
Rating: 
Summary: A terrible book for the beginner
Review: I picked up this book because an initial scan through the contents gave it the appearance that it covered more material than others and would be good as a beginner book and also as a reference book later. Unfortunately, there are just so many errors (in the code samples and the text) that I think a beginner programmer would get completely lost. If you are already an adept programmer, than this may be an ok book (well, maybe not for its price), but I think that there are plenty of better books out there. But if you can't recognize an error such as "the size of an array indexed from 0 to 49 is 49", then DON'T BUY THIS BOOK; go with one of the Sam's Teaching VB books.
Rating: 
Summary: A good reference on Visual Basic
Review: I purchased this book more than one years ago, when I was not really proficient in VB programming. To me, this is a very good reference book on VB programming. It covers a lot of the features of Visual Basic. And more important, it is very practical. I refer to this book often for information to solve real programming problems. This book is definitely a good reference book for beginners or intermediate programmers of VB. It may not be a good text book for learning VB programming though, as it is too thick and covers too many topics. For the real advanced knowledge of a specific topic, this book may not be the right one either.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best VB books on the Market.!!!!!!!!!
Review: I rate this book highly because I think the book is easy to use and the examples are great. I am a mainframe programmer and I find his way of explaining things to be very good. I was recently certified in VB 5.0. And this book helped a lot. The author is very consistent in quality in every chapter. I have read this book twice. I recommend it to everyone. After you read this book then you might look for others, but I would start here. I am glad he did not spend a lot of time on ADO and database information - you can find that in other books. I think that the material he DID cover was appropriate for a book such as this.
Rating:
Summary: Mastering Visual Basic 6 Lacks Indexing
Review: I use this text daily and it has a great deal of information in it for intermediate VB programmers. What I have found is that the index is sorely lacking. I often use the index of other text books to find what I'm looking for then try to cross reference the topic back to Mastering Visual Basic 6.
Rating:
Summary: Mastering Visual Basic 6 Lacks Indexing
Review: I use this text daily and it has a great deal of information in it for intermediate VB programmers. What I have found is that the index is sorely lacking. I often use the index of other text books to find what I'm looking for then try to cross reference the topic back to Mastering Visual Basic 6.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best out there - intermediate level
Review: I work with data extensively and have used VB on and off for the past couple of years. This book is by far the best reference I've run across. I would NOT recommend this book for anyone without a foundation in programming concepts. For a true beginner, I would recommend the "dummies" series by IDG.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a superb reference
Review: It doesn't cover *everything* and isn't really suited to the absolute beginner, but generally speaking it's a superb reference - from the novice to the advanced it will be of great value, well worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Should have covered important topics more extensively.
Review: It sure is hard to find ONE good book on VB. If you can work your way through all of the coding and description errors in this book, you'll at least learn some things. Unfortunately, though, Petroutsos doesn't provide enough examples for one to become very comfortable with important concepts like arrays, functions, procedures, and arguments. After I bought this book I found out that it was written based on a beta version of VB6. At least Sybex, the publisher, provides some code fixes on their Web site. I don't believe that this book will make you a master, but it will give you some good ideas if you place its information beside information from other sources.
Rating:
Summary: The perfect reference and then some
Review: Like the other "Mastering ..." books, this one will be the big ol' reference manual that is always sitting open on your desktop. Perfect for beginners all the way through advanced programmers. There are concrete examples for learning new topics. A great index gets you to the answers quickly. ADO, ActiveX controls, the works!
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