How to Use Visual Basic 6

Rating:
Summary: Simple but easy
Review: An excellant high level introduction to the basics. The pictures & colors & tasks made for a straight forward overview of terms, techniques, and concepts. This could be your first (but not second) book on VB.

Rating:
Summary: Just a few more hours work and it would have been 5 stars.
Review: If only the authors, their editors and production staff had put in a few more hours work. The concept is great. But the execution is very flawed. Errors abound. Some descriptions and illustrations just don't belong together. On occasion, the far too small to read without a magnifier code in the screen shots is just plain wrong. I'm not sure if the authors or the editors deserve the blame on this one, but the structure is very strange. The authors will provide a "do this" example - and follow it with a couple of pages of explanations about various features. Unfortunately it isn't intuitive that the reader isn't expected to type the explanatory feature code shown on his machine. Very confusing and something that could have been prevented by legends or sidebars distinguishing between "type this" and "don't type this." The authors clearly know their stuff and, for the most part, do well in explaining VB6 to rank beginners. But all the errors make it somewhat irritating to use. A few more hours of work and perhaps more skilled editors and production team people would convert this in a 5 star tutorial for beginning programmers.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: Just a few more hours work and it would have been 5 stars.
Review: If only the authors, their editors and production staff had put in a few more hours work. The concept is great. But the execution is very flawed. Errors abound. Some descriptions and illustrations just don't belong together. On occasion, the far too small to read without a magnifier code in the screen shots is just plain wrong. I'm not sure if the authors or the editors deserve the blame on this one, but the structure is very strange. The authors will provide a "do this" example - and follow it with a couple of pages of explanations about various features. Unfortunately it isn't intuitive that the reader isn't expected to type the explanatory feature code shown on his machine. Very confusing and something that could have been prevented by legends or sidebars distinguishing between "type this" and "don't type this." The authors clearly know their stuff and, for the most part, do well in explaining VB6 to rank beginners. But all the errors make it somewhat irritating to use. A few more hours of work and perhaps more skilled editors and production team people would convert this in a 5 star tutorial for beginning programmers.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: Great idea - terrible execution
Review: The idea of the structure of this book is great: teach visual basic by having the reader perform tasks. Each task is small enough that it can be described in 7 or less steps (2 pages). Illustrate the steps of the tasks with screen shots.

However, the execution of the book is bad to poor. Many times the tasks are not tasks but just information presented as tasks. There are many editorial errors (spelling errors, inconsistencies between text and screen shots, inconsistencies between steps in a task) that make it hard to execute the tasks (I guess you could argue that teachs you debugging...). Maybe future editions of the book will be cleaned up.

Rating:
Summary: Great idea - terrible execution
Review: This book has lovely graphics, but is hard to read and follow. The examples in the text are in extremely small type and difficult to decipher. The subject index is limited, and the topics are covered in only a brief and cursory manner. The book seems to have sacrificed content for graphics.

There are much better books available, even for beginners, such as Peter Norton's Guide to VB6, Mastering VB6, and VB6 the Black Book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Visual Tutorial
Review: This is one of the best introductory "bargain" choice for Visual Basic 6 programming. Very colorful and very easy to follow, as it is designed for self-starters and for children as well, with a parent's touring. I really enjoy reading this book, and used as a eye-opener for my students who have never been exposed to the programming (and a few other books in this series of "Visually in Full Color".

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Visual Tutorial
Review: This is one of the best introductory "bargain" choice for Visual Basic 6 programming. Very colorful and very easy to follow, as it is designed for self-starters and for children as well, with a parent's touring. I really enjoy reading this book, and used as a eye-opener for my students who have never been exposed to the programming (and a few other books in this series of "Visually in Full Color".