Rating:  - The cream of the crop
I have practically worn this book out over the past two years, referring to it on a near-daily basis as I have developed a comprehensive application from start to finish. The ultimate VB reference manual, the author gives you lots of tips and tricks to make your code more powerful and efficient. As others have said, this book is not for beginners. But if you have a little experience with VB, it will quickly take you to the advanced level.
Rating: - This is a must read
It's easy to write productive programs in Visual Basic, so much so that you don't really need anything but the online help to get you going. But as your solutions get more and more intricate the need to find 'elegant' solutions becomes more and more important. That's where this book comes in. I wish I had read this book two years ago, that way I wouldn't be unlearning and relearning so much now.
VB5 and VB6 while not fully Object Oriented languages are close and it's important to learn this concept sooner rather than later and that is the main focus of this book. I highly recommend this book to beginning and intermediate programmers alike.
Rating: - A nice golden nugget of comprehensive information -
I absolutely love this book!
This is the book I had always lusted after but could not find; it covers all the information I am fairly conversant in, and then introduces me to topics in what I consider the stratosphere of VB6 knowledge. But "introduces" is just a misnomer, he covers all those topics in depth enough for one to understand the underlying structure intended, and how all the individual parts/components take their place in the microsoft authors' schemata of hierarchal system programming.
From the start, the author plainly admits he will not start teaching in a linear, keyword by keyword, fashion; rather he covers the topics, from the less complex to the more, in a usage oriented manner, as coming from someone who has learned the ins and outs only from experience. He makes you privy to stuff that just does not exist in written/documented form.
The text reads more like a well explained tour than a textbook.
I am a professional BASIC programmer from the old school, text oriented (what they call scripts now), and in line. Although I am a whiz-bang at the actual programming part, I still feel apprehensive about how all the components and submodules, communicate with eachother; it feels like the unknown has no understandable structure I can apprehend. This book gives me a sense that it is all actually out there only waiting to be discovered and learned, that is all just a matter of fact.
Overall, this IS my most favorite learning (and reference) VB6 book. Making it all the more valuable is the installable on-line electron version of the book, to which I go to more often for reference than the MSDN help utility. I still have lot more to learn/read, but this book makes me feel secure that I will be able to.
Rating:  - Some VB knowledge required
If you are new to VB, I would recommend buying "Programming in Visual Basic 6.0" by Julia Case Bradley and Anita C. Millspaugh. Francesco's book is written as if you already know some basic stuff about VB. Francesco's book is comprehensive, it's just not for beginners.
Rating: - Not for amateurs or beginners
This book never was intended for amateur or beginner Visual Basic developers. This is an advanced Visual Basic book for advanced or more experienced developers. This book is "The Bible" when it comes to programming Visual Basic. This book contains a lot of pages and is one of the thickest books in my Visual Basic 6.0 collection but it is one of the most used books that I have. Although not really a "reference book", I use it to find examples of hard-to-solve problems. If if is not covered in this book, there probably is no solution.
|
