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.
| 
