Rating: 
Summary: I pass it from 1st time with this book
Review: A book cover about 75% of 70-176 Exam. You will need something extra to read
Rating: 
Summary: Horrible Book
Review: I am probably beating a dead horse but this book is a complete waste of time (or worse as it actually does damage). In the first chapter alone, there are at least four glaring errors (not typos - real conceptual errors). There are additionally some really bad explanations. It is hard to believe that this guy holds himself up as a VB expert. Coriolos should be ashamed. Luckily it appears to be out of print so it will no longer pollute.
Rating: 
Summary: Hasn't Failed Me Yet
Review: I have used Exam Cram books for my first three exams:
70-100,
70-029,
70-176,
- and have passed all on the first try. These books get you certified! I will be purchasing the Exam Cram book for the 70-175 exam shortly to finish my MCSD.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite a few typos, conceptual errors, even in practical exam
Review: I haven't taken the exam but I read the book in great details. There are more typos than I can accept. A lot of material is totally different from MSDN. (I think I can trust MSDN more). There are even errors in the Sample test. Some chapters are not explained well so I could not even tell it is right or wrong.If you have plenty of time and know VB very well, you can sharpen your proof skill by reading this. The editor of this book in Coriolis should be blamed on his poor work. Mr. MacDonald, please proof read your work and try all your code before you put in text.
Rating:
Summary: Helpful supplementary material
Review: I just passed the VB6 desktop exam, and this book helped in the process. I did 3 things to prepare for the exam: 1) As a primary source, I read the VB6 desktop applications book by MS Press; 2) I used this book to supplement the first one; 3) I spent some time outside of work trying things in the VB IDE (such as seldom-used debugging tools) so I was ready to handle trick questions. This book was a helpful supplement because its many sample test questions are fairly difficult, and the author points out many unusual or tricky aspects of VB that the main text ignores. Often these tricky details become the basis for test questions, and the author helps you anticipate these. Yes there are a few errors in the book, but not many, and the harder sample questions combined with detailed explanations will help you to face the real test. The MS Press book is good but very basic, and by itself does not give you enough to pass the test, unless you are already a very experienced MS developer.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Exam Cram - Tought me how to take an MS Exam
Review: I thought this book was excellent. I scored a solid 814 my first try at the test without any prior VB experience, just programming experience in C/Basic/Cobol/Assembly-80x86 in Unix/VMS/DOS for about 10 years, but no windows/event-driven/oo experience. I also used transcenders and NETg CBT's, which were all big help. This book tought me how to take a microsoft exam. The author's questions were just as tough and devious, which was excellent. The material in the book is laid out great and I love the "Alert" side-bars. I think any exam cram book should be part of everyone's study materials. They're inexpensive and they don't attempt to teach the material as much as they teach you how to take the exam. The 70-176 exam has tricky devious questions and this book helps.
Rating: 
Summary: Average supplemental study source
Review: I would never recommend just 1 or 2 book to use as a study guide. When I was studying for the exams, I used about 6 or 7 books including this one. This book is OK if you use it as a supplemental to all of your other study guides. If you use this book as your single source of study for the 70-176 exam, you will probably fail. Only about 60-70% of material in this book is on the test. There are several errors in the practice questions at the end of the chapters and in the practice test at the end of the book. I would recommend James D. Foxall's "MCSD in a Nutshell" (See my review of that book) and the Transcender courses as you primary study guides.
Rating:
Summary: Too brief
Review: The book is too brief. I must say that it is not easy to write a good book for this exam, as the scope fo the exam is wide. I normally classfied a book in these few aspect : Exam prep, Reference, Beginner's guide or Advance. This book is not good at any of the aspect. I do not even use it as reference after I passed the exam. I use Transcender and MSDN, with many hands-on practice. These two helps me the most, not this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not necessary to pass the exam
Review: This book has a lot of good info in it. Alone, it is a good VB reference book. However, it has more info than could possibly be on the exam. Therefore you spend too much time learning what might be on the exam and not enough time on the exact exam material. In the end, I used the Microsoft Mastering Series CD-ROM, Transcender, and MSDN. This was just the right amount of reference material to help me pass. I would spend my money on those, and not on this book to pass 70-176. Also, I used the same materials to pass 70-175.
Rating:
Summary: Falls short, but recommend anyway with Exam Cram for 70-175
Review: With a few years of work-related VB5/6 experience under my belt, I chose Mr. MacDonald's book in preparation for Exam 70-176 as my primary study guide. I believe my edition was the 5th printing, which already has the corrections listed on Coriolis' website. Despite this, the book was still full of errors, both minor (such as typos) and major (technical errors or flaws). The errors will generally not affect your success on the exam, but does cause the informed reader to question the author's credibility from time to time. This is unfortunate, since the book does cover a lot of relevant material. It does lack some of the material found on the exam, though, but it's not a bad choice if you supplement it with additional material (see below) I shouldn't discount the value of the material presented in the book, even though quality suffers. For me, the attribute of having inaccuracies actually helped me by forcing me to question various claims, and double-check other sources such as the VB IDE or online documentation -- consequently, it re-inforced the information. Most errors are very minor -- for example, MacDonald states a few times that vbFixedDouble is one of the values for a Form's BorderStyle property, when it really should be vbFixedDialog. Similar typos include mention of a ControlMenu property when it is really a ControlBox property. In some cases, he indicates a property should be True when in actuality it should be False for a given scenario. Another mistake I found was the use of Shift+F9 in the VB editor, where Ctrl+F9 was the actual command he meant. This list only scratches the surface. Clearly, all of these were the result of carelessness or poor editing, but nothing that will cause you to suffer on the exam. Technical faux pas are not as easily excused. For example, MacDonald indicates that an object declaration WithEvents can be done in a standard module which is incorrect (it can only be done in form or class modules). He also claims that the Command Line Arguments text field of the Project Properties is used to specify compilation switches, when it is actually provided to assign a string to Command$. Another example is on page 29-30, which is too lengthy to describe, but is very much in error (which you'll pick up on while reading it). Yikes. The most major shortcoming of the book is that it only covers about 75-80% of the material which Exam 70-176 focuses on. I find it remarkable that the author even acknowledges this: "Though they are not strictly part of the Visual Basic product (and thus not really discussed within this book) [... there may be] a couple of questions about Visual Source Safe, and [...] Visual Component Manager." Guess what? You may find 4-5 questions on these topics alone, plus a few questions on things like the Package and Deployment tool which the book discusses insufficiently for the exam. My feeling is that if the book is intended to cover the material on Exam 70-176, then they should be adequately discussed in the book without exception! Fortunately, the other 20% of testable material is covered in the Coriolis Exam Cram for Exam 70-175 by Thomas and Fox (a very good book by comparison, with a lot of overlapping material found on Exam 70-176). If you intend to write both exams anyway, I would definitely recommend reading both books before attempting to do the exams since they complement each other well. The Exam Cram for 70-175 fills in all the gaps that this book leaves, including VSS, VCM, PDW, etc., and it is technically sound.
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