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

The niche of this book is that it not only focuses on the topic at hand but it also provides a battery of tools/skills that will take the user at a higher level and help him/her realize the skills “without waiting to read another book” on some other topic they need to know if they wanted to implement it in real life. It is a self contained, stand alone book. Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours follows the step-by-step approach of the Teach Yourself series and gives the reader a quick, concise introduction to this programming language. It will explain the basics of Visual Basic through task-oriented examples and a hands on approach. Topics covered include: Basics of Visual Basic development, Understanding the concepts of properties, methods, and events, Creating and implementing ActiveX controls, Integrating data into applications, Adding and manipulating graphics, Testing and debugging applications, Printing from your applications.

Providing a decent overview of how to construct graphical interfaces with Visual Basic 6, Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours quickly teaches the novice Visual Basic programmer how to write simple applications that work. Readers should keep in mind, though, that this book addresses Visual Basic from a beginner's perspective: you'll want another book to help you with more complicated aspects of the language.

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