Rating: 
Summary: A Great Beginning!
Review: After using this book and two of its predecessors for five years in Boston area universities, I can't tell you how many of my students have given it rave reviews. It is made for the beginning programming student, so it has plenty of detail. While some advanced users may find it overly detailed, I find it very easy to teach from. The CD-ROM with a limited learning edition of VB 6.0 will give students the ability to write very sophisticated VB projects without the need to buy a full blown version of the software. In addition, each chapter has an excellent summary, questions pertaining to conceptual material, and plenty of problems - many of which are partially completed and provided with the student data files. In my opinion, this is one of the finest programming text books sold.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Beginning!
Review: After using this book and two of its predecessors for five years in Boston area universities, I can't tell you how many of my students have given it rave reviews. It is made for the beginning programming student, so it has plenty of detail. While some advanced users may find it overly detailed, I find it very easy to teach from. The CD-ROM with a limited learning edition of VB 6.0 will give students the ability to write very sophisticated VB projects without the need to buy a full blown version of the software. In addition, each chapter has an excellent summary, questions pertaining to conceptual material, and plenty of problems - many of which are partially completed and provided with the student data files. In my opinion, this is one of the finest programming text books sold.
Rating: 
Summary: Not What I Expected.
Review: Although the content of the book was well written, I felt that the author fell short in allowing the reader to fully interact with the tutorials. The book consistently follows examples and problems which are part of a six-disk set, but these examples and problems were not included with the book. If the book was specifically written to be part of a classroom environment, then all of the files, examples and resources should accompany the book.
Rating: 
Summary: For absolute beginners only !
Review: As an intermediate programmer, i was very disappointed with the book. It covered only issues relevant for beginners and used approach suited for beginners (i.e. very detailed). The title should have been like introduction, for beginners, etc. to prevent us more advanced from buying the book.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed feelings, but leaning toward the negative
Review: First, the price: almost $51 (plus shipping, of course). You can find books that cover way much more material for less than this. Second, the structure of the book. It is clear that the author's objective was to make it practical, and by grabbing several sample cases which are actually fun to implement, she gradually introduces user to the different objects (with their properties), functions, and methods available to the VB6 developer. This sounds OK, and for the first few pages (or classes) it is, but once you are past the point where you're no longer a begginner, it becomes a textbook which organizes information in a way that's very hard to go back to. The same function (the MsgBox function, for example) is covered several times within the book, each time going into a little more detail, and sometimes, in a very out of context way with respect to the material being dealt with at that point in the book. Although the author spends a lot of effort to describe step-by-step (in a fool-proof way) what the user has to do in order to add an object, change its propertis, etc. the book doesn't cover well at all (or in a consistent way, at least) how the user can better exploit the hotkeys or shortcuts VB6's IDE has to offer in order to boost productivity and efficiency. As for practice, each tutorial (that's how the sections are callled) contains exercises that refer the user to the Student Disk. Although the book comes with a CD (which happily contains the Learning version of VB6) I have yet to find any of the exercises mentioned, or the so-called Student Disk. At the end of each tutorial, the book contains a set of questions and exercises. The exercises are very good to practice the skills learned within the tutorial, but the questions deal with far too much theory, and sometimes become a little too repetitive, in my opinion. In general, I'd say the book (and in this I agree with most of the reviews here) is OK for a very early learning stage, but past the first few days/weeks learning VB6, it is not the type of book you feel like going back to, because of the way it is organized and the lack of detail with which some topics are covered, which is definitely the largest downside it has. I will always need another reference book by my side to compensate for the book's shortcomings.
Rating: 
Summary: A total waste of money
Review: Giving this book 1 star is generous. At best, it deserves 0 stars. The only circumstances under which you should buy this book is if it is the required text for a class. The fundamental problem is that this book is WAY too long (800+ pages) and at the end, it still hasn't gotten that far into VB. Why? Because every concept takes PAGES to explain. For the student, this may be useful - once! Then it makes it extremely difficult to use the book for reference, such as when needing a refresher later on for a topic introduced earlier (such as when going through the end of chapter exercises). If this book were less than 1/2 as long, it might be better. Might be. Also, I found the graphics style and general layout of the book annoying. Do I have a better recommendation? No. But unless you need to have your hand held each and every little step of the way, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: decent book
Review: good book but she does talk too much about every detail
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT!!! OUTSTANDING!!! GOOD LEARNING TOOL!!
Review: Great book with good organization of subject matter and consistent format! I'm just learning VB and find this to be my best option of all VB learning material at my disposal! I'm looking to master C++ as well and will turn to Diane Zak!!! Good job!!!
Rating:
Summary: This is how to learn Visual Basic
Review: I am a Programmer/Analyst student and I had to buy this book for a course on Visual Basic. Out of all the textbooks I've had to purchase I really like the ones published by Course Technology. This book, Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, is designed for beginners. It teaches programming concepts by having you work step-by-step through 10 tutorials that will give you hands-on programming experience creating Windows applications. By working through the tutorials you will develop the skills necessary to move on to more advanced programming. This book is by no means too basic. Though it is designed for beginners you will learn some pretty complicated concepts like variables and constants, the repetition structure (loops), sequential & random Access, error trapping, database access, and variable arrays. After you have mastered the tutorials in this book, I recommend moving on to a more comprehensive book such as 'Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 An Object-Oriented Approach' by Michael Ekedahl and William Newman (ISBN 0-7600-5855-5).
Rating:
Summary: A Text most worthy of praise
Review: I am only halfway through this most excellent text, and I have only this to say. If you are a beginner programmer and are looking for a text that will lay a solid foundation, all the while adhering to the Microsoft standard for programming and designing, then this is the text for you. Using mini projects, Diane introduces you to key concepts that you will not forget when you close the book. Dianne's didatic style is such that you walk away from the text with the ability to approach problems from almost any angle. SIMPLY THE BEST TEXT ON THE MARKET IN TERMS OF INTRODUCTORY VB PROGROMMING. Much kudos to Diane Zak!!
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