Rating: 
Summary: An exceptionally gifted teacher
Review: John Smiley is both sympathetic and thorough. He does 75% of the work in the teaching-learning partnership. It's about as painless as learning gets.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit too basic for Visual Basic
Review: If you think you really want to have a go at VB and want to learn fast, (maybe your the type who buys a computer book and devours it) then you may want to look elsewhere. While well written and entertaining, I was looking for something where I wouldn't get a page of filler for every page of content. On the flip side, if you don't want a text book and you really want everything spelled out, you may really enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: What can I say? It's the best beginner's book out there!
Review: I've purchased a couple of other "Beginner's" VB books (Peter Wright's "Beginning VB 6", Cornell's "VB 6 from the Ground Up") and this book blows both of them out of the water as training tools. Besides being overly dry, the other books just assumed you knew too much about programming. This comes from a person who works in the IT field and took a college course in VB 5 just last year (boy, that an awful course, but I got a "B").I thought that the "discussion-in-a-classroom" style of Smiley's book would bother me, but it's acutally interesting to read. You almost get the feeling that you're in a real class - some students are more experienced than others, with a really patient instructor. He covers stuff that my college professor didn't teach, and he actually promotes good programming practices, such as doing a layout of your program interface before you start building the screens and writing code. By the time you reach the end of the book, you're doing some pretty fancy stuff (writing to the system registry, doing subprocedures and handling run-time errors). I love this book, and have his other VB books on order.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely the best for a beginner
Review: This book is the best introductry book I've ever read. Mr. Smiley takes a subject that can take many twists and turns and leads you through the maze. At the end of the book I feel I have a very good foundation to build on. Well worth the money and I recommend it for anyone who is considering visual basic.
Rating: 
Summary: What editor? Infuriating!
Review: I bet the author is a great guy and a fine teacher. I think that his book is full of distracting grammatical errors. And what is the point of recording every stupid remark that somebody made in class? I bought this book because I need help in learning VB/VBA; I'm back in the market for a decent book. I give two stars to this book because the author seems knowledgeable and offers some good ideas. The missing stars are for the missing editor.
Rating:
Summary: For Absolute Beginners
Review: The label at the top of the front cover should not be overlooked. John Smiley has found the way to teach you VB by holding your hand without seeming to hold your hand. This book and the others in the series make it seem too easy. After going through his books (this one and the one on databases), I was able to zip through a college course this summer where the emphasis was on getting it done in a compressed amount of time. Before I read this book, I had never done ANY programming of ANY kind. Now I feel fairly competent. And my professor was amazed at how well I did, since I had taken the class without meeting any of the prerequisites. Buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: Good Investment for Beginner
Review: If there is an award for the most creative technical book author. It will be John Smiley.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for beginners
Review: I had to learn VB for my current job and did not know anything about programming.For the first page on, I felt my knowledge was increasing and so did my self-confidence. John Smiley starts his book with a general introduction about how computers process information and with a review of the basics (like the concept of variables, how to use them and where, and why!; the basic VB controls, etc). Then through the project implemented throughout the book you get a picture of how all these elements combine in order to develop an application. This book is really for beginners, you don't need previous knowledge to fully enjoy it. John Smiley's style is very friendly and not obscure at all, it is often enriched with real life examples. I would say it is a must. If you have to start somewhere, this is it! I have now read "Learn To Program Databases with VB 6" by Smiley as well and it is the logical follow-up of his previous books (I personnaly skipped the book on Vb examples but I consider buying it). To do professional work I think it is necessary to go into further details. Smiley's books provide you with the required foundations.
Rating:
Summary: VERY HELPFUL, USER FRIENDLY, LIKE YOU'RE REALLY IN THE CLASS
Review: Great. Just like being in his classroom. I found that the students most of the time were asking the same questions I had, and Professor Smiley handled them all superbly.
Rating:
Summary: Truly The Most Useful Beginner Programming Book!
Review: Let me start by saying that I'm not a beginner--I've been using Visual Basic 3 and 4 for programming on-and-off for several years now. In fact, the only reason that I bought this book in the first place was for the CD, which includes a fully functional version of Visual Basic 6 (vastly improved from 4). But my curiousity got the best of me and I did look through the book, and what I saw delighted me! This book teaches Visual Basic in a really inventive way--putting you in a class of beginners like yourself. You start from the bottom, learning about how your computer makes the code you write work, and then you learn increasingly complex code. Along the way, the students ask questions that most beginners might find themselves wondering. There are reviews, quizzes, everything! Most books *say no programming experience is required, but this one means it. I threw away over 3 years of programming experience in favor of starting from scratch because this book was so great! You won't find a better book for beginners. If I could have rated it past 5 stars, I definitely would have!
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