Visual Basic 6 from the Ground Up

This was a good reference book. Especially for the money. I find it helpful to have 2-3 ref. books per language for review in case I need them. Amazon does an awesome job supplying thses type of books at a low price.

This book seems to be marketed for those who want to learn Visual Basic, but in reality, I don't think it's well suited for beginners. I was already familiar with Visual Basic 4.0, and when I got Visual Basic 6.0, which dosen't come with any manual at all (other than the online help), I picked up this book to help me with the new features.I got a fair amount out of it, but there are some deficiencies.For one, the chapter on File Handling could be better. A lot better. I usually look back to my old VB 4.0 books when I need to look something up on file handling.The chapter on 'Recursion' is simply bizzare, and I have no idea why it's in the book. Would anyone actually ever use the chapter? Er, not really, unless you want to draw math based graphic patterns.Which reminds me of the graphics section. It mostly deals with drawing pixel by pixel commands, which generally produces horrible, child like graphics, while the most common form of using graphics in programs, painting, moving and manipulating premade bitmaps is barely touched on.

Two cents from a rank amateur/beginning programmer. At the moment, I'm on page 179 of this book and the main problem I have so far is with the way the information is communicated. Personally, I now know that I should have picked up a book that taught VB concepts via small projects and tasks. A "in chapter 1 we'll build a simple tool to get familiar w/ the IDE. In chapter 2 we'll improve our skillset by building a slightly advanced tool to learn about declaring variables, etc." approach would work better for me. Unfortunately, this book doesn't really do that. The concepts here are explained mostly with bits of standalone code. Hopefully, perhaps by page 200, we'll commence with some "learning by doing." Yes, hopefully. In the meantime, I'll grit my teeth and continue with the book, but right now it simply isn't working for me.

The text is aimed at the complete novice. If you don't know anything about programming, you will probably find this book helpful. If you are knowledgeable at all, the text will be tedious. The book attempts to cover too much, and hence the depth to which any subject is treated is extremely small. As an introduction to programming and VB, the book could have been shorter; I opine that approximately a third of the chapters could've been eliminated. Here's a paraphrased Table Of Contents: The IDE & Help; Simple Programs; First Steps Building The User Interface; First Steps In Programming; Displaying Information; Controlling Program Flow; Built-In Functions; Writing Your Own Functions; Organizing Information Via Code; Organizing Information Via Controls; Building Larger Projects; Introduction To Object Oriented Programming; Finishing The Interface; An Intro To Graphics; Monitoring Mouse Activity; Basic File Handling; File System Controls; Communicating With Other Windows Apps; Recursion; A Survey Of Database Development With VB; Building Your Own Activex Controls; Building A Web Browser; Vbscript And HTML; Distributing Your App.

This book is a great introduction to VB6. It covers everything you need to know to use VB6 to create your own programs. All of the basics are covered. The IDE is covered along with all the relevant tools. The basic language syntax is also covered so you'll know how to write the code behind the various events. The book has well thought out and thoroughly explained examples, which is very important in my opinion. The book is a good starting point for the beginning VB programmer.

Hi everyone,I am a computer science student at University of Maryland Univ College and this book was the textbook for the introductory Visual Basic course. Some students that I know returned the book after a few weeks but most of my classmates ended up buying different books because the book does not explain anything clearly or concisely. Second of all the book is not easy to follow, meaning it will stop short of a topic and that will be it. And if your trying to learn something, it gets frustrating and you start to wonder why there's no more explanation. What the author does do is give you code that you can copy if you want. I had a Visual Basic 5 book lying around by Alan Eliason and Ryan Malarky, QUE Press, and that book is the only thing that got me by that semester.A Student from Maryland

After buying the book and spending a lot of time reading,I only picked up some little ideas, alhough I'm not a novice programmer and have been using visual basic 6 occasionally, I find this book un-appealing. Some pages are distorted with icons appearing which makes the page unreadable. The binding is poor, the pages and the book in general is too bulky, and focuses much on graphics object. The book discusses some note on database programming, but it failed to highlight the most important parts like ADO and multiple table joins. If you really need to have a book for self-studying and have lots of money to spend, I suggest you buy Sam's Teach yourself visual basic 6 in 21 days to get your money's worth. Gary Cornell failed to lay out the foundations of Visual Basic to some novice programmers like my friends. I should know because I've been monitoring their progress .