Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

You get the idea, don't you? Basically, this is _THE BOOK_ for Visual Basic! There is absolutely no better book on the language! This book, 1000+ plus pages thick, gives you a comprehensive tutorial and serves as a reference to the VB language in case you know it already. Although I haven't gone over every part of the book yet, you can see from how the book is organized that Mr. Balena is a structured and good writer. The first Part in the book gives you an intro to the language, but the "intro" is basically what all newbies need to get the basic gist of VB. From then on, you can read the rest of the book for more cool topics or you can start building your own desktop apps and use the book as a reference.

In the second part of the book, Mr. Balena goes over a wealth of controls included with Visual Basic. His two chapters on the "Windows Common Controls" were extremely useful to me because I can use it as a reference for the MS Common Dialog , Toolbar, and RichTextBox controls, to name a few. The Common Dialog control is where you get the typical Win32 FileOpen, FileSave, and Print forms. Mr. Balena goes over the properties of all the controls and explains them in detail. Then at the end of Part II, Mr. Balena goes over additional ActiveX controls like the MS Chart control.

Part III is for all you database programmers who want to see the power of VB in database programming. It gives you a comprehensive review on using the ADO (ActiveX DataControl-- Microsoft's replacement of DAO and RDO as the newest and best database control for VB). This Part teaches you how to link with different types of databases like a SQL server, and it also gives a brief intro to SQL commands in case you're not familiar with them.

Part IV is on ActiveX programming (including parts on creating your own ActiveX controls) and Part V is Internet programming. I have not yet looked at these sections in detail yet and so cannot provide a comprehensive review, but with the book's consistents outstanding performance in earlier parts, I'm sure these chapters are very good also.

As a bonus, Mr. Balena provides a commonly used Windows API functions appendix at the end of the book.

I hope you see that this book is very effective no matter what kind of programmer you are. If you're new you can learn. If you know the basics, you can learn the cool stuff. If you are a guru, you can use it as a complete reference which explains many things better than the MSDN documentation included w/ Visual Basic.

An example I ran into might help you decide. On p. 178 the author describes an example of an "array of arrays" creating an appointment calendar with descriptions of appointments stored in the array of arrays named "apps(day)". As part of the code, the satement appears

If IsEmpty(apps(day)) Then

I was surprised to find that IsEmpty ALWAYS evaluated FALSE, making this If statement useless. Once this problem was discovered, I found from the online help that IsEmpty always evaluates false unless apps(day) is a simple variant. (Do you know this? I had to find out.)

Can apps(day) be a simple empty variant? It's supposed to be an array of arrays. Well, if you initiate apps(day) with

apps(day) = Empty

then the If statement works. But if you initiate apps(day) with

apps(day) = Array(Empty)

which is how it's done when apps(day) is NOT empty, for example,

apps(day) = Array("First meeting of day", "Second meeting of day")

then the If statement won't work unless it is changed to

If IsEmpty(apps(day)(0)) Then

(What do you know about arrays, array notation, how empty array notation changes when it fills? I had to find out.)

What does this have to do with evaluating the book? The above example is not unusual. If you are happy to read at an abstract level, the gist of the examples is clear, and the examples are interesting. In the above example, it's clear what the IsEmpty is about, and the "array of arrays" idea is great. However, if you want to implement the author's ideas using his code, his elliptical approach leaves gaps and ambiguities. Depending on your VB background, the needed fill-in and clarification can require much head-scratching.

Bottom line: As a stimulus to the imagination, definitely go ahead. As practical coding, be prepared to fuss.