Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself)

Fortunately, the authors don't get bogged down in documenting every last menu item and button in the Visual Basic 6 environment, as do the authors of many introductory books. Rather, they explain how to write real--if simple and somewhat academic--programs. This book would be stronger if it included more material on the "Basic" portion of Visual Basic--the actual code that must be written manually when you reach the end of the visual environment's capabilities. While the authors provide plenty of information on each of the popular graphical user interface elements--list boxes, labels, and the like--they don't pay enough attention to the language that endows those components with functionality. To be fair, though, many books about visual development environments fall into this trap.

ActiveX controls, which you can create with Visual Basic 6, don't receive much space either. This is more a function of the language than of this book--no novice programmer will write controls of any consequence without first gathering some experience, certainly not in 24 hours. --David Wall

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

VB 6 in 24 Hours, 2007-04-10
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is a great read and very informative.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Poorly written., 2005-07-27
I have had good luck with this book, ONLY because I have had other programming languages. It does get into actual coding, but does little to explain how it works.

The authors experiments in the CD are quite lame. The ones that DO work off the CD offer no usefulness.

If you are good with programming already, this book will be useful if you are new to VB, cause you can figure out how to make bigger better projects. But most of what you do in VB will be of your own experimentation. Don't count on this book offering any real programs. It merely gives you the puzzle pieces, and it is up to you what you do with them.


3 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

Useless Book..Don't waste your money, 2005-05-27
A Great Introduction to VB
U Gotta be kidding me
This book SUCKS!
If you really want to waste your time reading this get it from a library
and
If u have nothing to waste ur money on u can buy this

lol


12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

A Great Introduction to VB, 2005-05-18
At the University of Redlands, one of my biggest gripes was the use of ineffectual textbooks - the type that are better used as doorstops than for actual learning and/or reference. I had struggled with the idea of wasting money on books required for each class and tried something a bit different when I took Visual Basic 6. Instead of the required doorstop textbook, I purchased SAMS' TEACH YOURSELF VISUAL BASIC 6 IN 24 HOURS. I was very happy with that decision!

SAMS' TEACH YOURSELF VISUAL BASIC 6 IN 24 HOURS provides a good overview of Visual Basic and is definitely written for beginners. Even with this agenda, not every menu item is shown so the reader feels like an idiot. I found the answers to my questions easily and this book gave me a basic understanding of how VB works. Examples of code provided in the book teach the reader to write code rather than have him/her following along with few brain cells needed.

Towards the end of the book, space is given to "Sprucing Up Programs" and glosses over more advance techniques using VB, like ActiveX controls. In order to learn more advanced VB, a different book will be needed, as this one should be used for an overview and introduction only.

The CD that accompanies this book will give the reader practice writing code. Some of the items covered here are: Labels, buttons, text boxes, controls and properties, message boxes, output boxes, looping, dialog boxes, printing, database basics, graphic image controls, and much more.

During my Visual Basic class, my fellow students struggled using the standard text. I breezed through my assignments and tests. A few weeks into the class, one friend asked if he could look at my book. After that, copies of SAMS' TEACH YOURSELF VISUAL BASIC 6 IN 24 HOURS started showing up and the standard text soon disappeared off many desks. We all agreed it was a much better choice for our needs!

SAMS' TEACH YOURSELF VISUAL BASIC 6 IN 24 HOURS is a great beginning source and will help the novice understand the basics. It is not intended as a die-hard resource book, but an introduction into this powerful programming tool.




4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

Absolute Crap, 2005-01-29
This book is a joke. If you want to give up learning VB OR learn VB ass-backwards way, I recommend you read this book. It'll give you a headache you won't believe.

Rather than giving you an overall viewpoint initially of what the program is about and how it works, they dive into stupid un-important specific details about what this command does and doesn't do..and even then, they don't show you how things work. Rather than explaining Global/Private procedures and overall layouts and approaches first, they lose you in this bizarre, nonsensical approach of messagebox and input box commands that mean nothing when you don't understand why they are there...

To think these people made a book and have a job in this field...how pathetic.

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