"A witty, well-written guide to Visual Basic 6.0."
I have a stack of Visual Basic books to wade through, and I chose this one because, well, I love Wally Wang. We go way back, back to obscure computer magazines and that one night in Vegas when we found $600 (plus an unknown amount of a certain South American currency) in our hotel room. But that's a story for another day.
I love the way Wally (known as Wallace on the cover because "Wally Wang" just doesn't translate well in England) writes. He can certainly make a dull subject bright. There is no denying his humor in the figures and throughout the text and examples.
The book is massively entertaining. But the question is, does it teach Visual Basic well? And therein lies the rub, not only in this but also with all Visual Basic books. Unlike traditional programming languages, Visual Basic is both a language and a product. So, the question is, which do you talk about first, creating a Visual Basic program or using the Visual Basic interface? Wally opts for the interface first, which he handles well. Alas, my goal in learning any new programming language is to write the first program. In this book, that doesn't happen until chapter 4. Ouch.
Happily, though, once the book gets going, there's no stopping it--it is
packed. The pace is swift, and the steps outlining each project are thick. This may be too much for some beginners, but it sated my appetite for relearning this programming language. (My first books were on GW Basic way back in the mid-1800s.)
The book's hefty cover price means it has a CD-ROM, which I didn't look at. But even without looking at it, I enjoyed reading Wally's text--something I haven't done in too long a time.
--Dan Gookin
Customer Reviews & Comments
Visual Basic 6 for Dummies was the first book I purchased to learn the fundamentals of VB. I have since purchased Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Step-by-Step and have recently ordered an intermediate level book, which I have not yet received. Because it was my first book on VB and I had no experience programming, I was able to get a lot from this book. I have since found that many of the methods and techniques, such as communicating with databases using the Data object (the only technique presented), to be too limiting for good programming. Sure, the techniques work, but I feel that if you're going to write real-world programs you need more depth, even as a beginner, than this book offers. But let's be fair. I'm a technical kind of guy who wants to learn as quickly as I can. This book has its good points, too. It is written in a style that is easy for non-technical types to stay interested and learn programming at a reasonable pace. I found the examples to be easy to follow and the explanations adequate while sometimes sketchy. The author uses humor, often pretty corny, to make it fun to read and his examples are written such that he rarely leaves you wondering how to use what you have just learned. If you are a true beginner with VB and want to learn some basic concepts without going too deep, this is may be a good book for you. If, however, you are looking to get in at a quicker pace and learn more flexible programming approaches, you may want to consider something else.
