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Summary: Excellent source for the beginner to get needed skills quick
Review: John does a great job helping us get started with Visual Basic. He is a committed author and teacher with a love of students who are serious about aquiring Visual Basic skills. The book is designed with the beginner in mind, easy and entertaining reading.
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Summary: Excellent for first time VB programming wanna be's.
Review: I was new to Visual Basic 6 and after many abortive attempts to find a book that instructed clearly and fully I found this to be a delight. The layout and content provided excellent resource to learn this language and proceed with a good understanding of even quite complex principles of VB6 programming
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Summary: Excellent Book for Beginners (and Oldies) in Visual Basic
Review: I have a BA in Computer Science, however I received my degree before Windows was even an inkling. I picked up this book and was amazed at the use of real projects and the review of system lifeline. The book is easy to read and thoroughly explains difficult topics.
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Summary: The best book for a beginner
Review: I loved this book. I am a beginner in programming, and every programming language looks complicated for a beginner. We are afraid of looking to all those lines of text that means nothing to us! But your book is sensational! Following your weekly lessons we are able to master (yes to master!) the basics of Visual Basic and be able to proceed with deeper adventures in the language. As a matter of fact, I started a ZDU your Visual Course on VB5, Beginning VB, and your Beginning VB5 is also a Must!, but this one is much better for a beginner. Congratulations! From Jayme Nery
Rating:
Summary: The best Visual Basic book for beginners.
Review: I am just learning Visual Basic 6 for a college course and am having trouble understanding some of the concepts. After purchasing Professor Smiley's book the information is definitely a lot clearer. I enjoyed the way that the book takes you through an actual class and provides a real world example of applying what you learn. A must read for beginners.
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Summary: Finally, a book that details the programming process
Review: I have been programming for a few years, and like a lot of programmers picked up pieces here and there. While the book is written for beginners, it details a definite process for application development, that many more experienced programmers can use.
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Summary: Great for any both the computer literati.
Review: When I first stumbled upon John Smiley's book a banner on the top of the cover screaming "For Abolute Beginners" immediately caught my attention. As an experienced but amateur basic programmer who had just purchased the Microsoft "learning" edition of Visual Basic I was turned off by its "documentaton" which appeared to be the kind of stuff that computer nerds create for an audience of other computer nerds.As I got into the Smiley book I found that it was exactly what I needed. While it covered much that I already knew something about, it clearly explained a multitude of changes that have enhanced programming languages in the last five years or so. To make it even better the book uses a format which allows one to generate a real program during the learning process, and even includes a version of Visual Basic on the accompanying CD. After working with it I am convinced that even if I never write a single program in VB I will have learned so much about the windows environment that the time devoted to the book will be more than warranted. My thanks to Professor Smiley, and I hope that others will join me in awarding his effort "for absolute beginners", or even those with some programming experience, no less than five stars.
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Summary: Textbooks make me sleep, this one read like a story-great!
Review: This book got the information across to me very well and in a way I really enjoyed. I can't reccomend it enough!
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Summary: Absolutely the best introductory book on VB I have read yet!
Review: Over the past 18 months, I have been reading various books on Visual Basic Programming. As a newbie to VB programming - I found the material to be incomplete and sometimes intimidating in every book EXCEPT Professor Smiley's. I was fortunate enough to discover and enroll in his online ZDU class, and of course, this is the textbook for both of his introductory classes. "Learn to Program with Visual Basic" has taught me more in the first 10 chapters than everything I learned in the previous year and a half with the other books. I am enjoying the book thoroughly, and give it my highest recommendation. John Smiley has an exceptional method of teaching such that the reader understands the material thoroughly, and best of all...he makes no assumptions with respect to prior knowledge and/or experience with Visual Basic. If you do not buy this book, you are truely missing out.
Rating:
Summary: Probably one of the best books for learning Visual Basic
Review: If you know absolutely nothing about programming and would like to learn programming in Visual Basic, this is the place to start. Using what could be a real-life case, the book not only takes you through the principles of programming in Visual Basic, but also includes a chapter about SLDC (Systems Development Life Cycle) and a very easy to understand chapter that explains how the computer works. The classroom approach used by John Smiley, gives the feeling of being instructed in a classroom, and ensures that the book in contrast to many other books about programming, never gets boring to read. The book covers all the basic principles of programming in Visual Basic, and after reading it you will be able to develop your own Visual Basic applications. The only thing I miss, is a chapter about using Ms Access databases with Visual Basic. Maybe a small thing, but I think its really important that the beginner gets used to good programming practice allready from the first day, so its very pleasing to see that throughout the book the author uses Hungarian notation. This is probably one of the best (If not the best) books for learning Visual Basic, and I will recommend it to everybody with no prior programming experience, who wants to learn to program in Visual Basic.
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