Customer Reviews

dogstar49 said
Because Visual Basic 6 remains a very useful programming environment for me. Mr. Balena's style goes way beyond a tutorial through menu creation. He tells us about pratfalls of the Microsoft environment ( while writing for Microsoft! ) and useful ways to work around limitations of the environment. If you are still using VB6, like I am, this is a useful reference. We might want to start looking at .NET, eh?

sobriant74 said
Good book for the novice with some experience programming but new to VB 6. Walks through the differences between other versions, and has some nice documentation.
I would recommend.

Anonymous said
code snippets are fragmented and some variables are used without
naming their types, causing confusion in many cases.

the chapters on classes and objects and databases are worthless:
i'm glad i didn't learn objects and databases from this guy.

many explanations are needlessly lengthy and confusing.

i've documented with profane remarks so many problems in this book that are simply not sharable.

Anonymous said
This book is a must have for any VB 6.0 programmer period. So buy it.

Not only is this book extremely informative, but Balena writes excellently. The way he communicates the information help's make the info stick in your head.

As for the informative part Balena covers all the major bases in depth and some of the more obscude/advanced topics to get your feet wet. He also shows you different and more efficent ways to write code.

If I had one complaint is that his code is not the most readable, Balena seems to center more on condensing his code and making it as efficent as possible rather than making it readable. He attempts to offset this with comments.

But that is also a postive about the book Balena covers different ways to write a statment to make it most efficent.

mike_frank_d said
I am totally new to V.B. and am attempting to write a fairly complex application straight off. EVERY time I have been stuck I have refered to this book and it has so far always helped me out. As a beginner I do not always immediatly grasp the code samples, but after searching through some more basic texts then returning to this book, I have so far always got the results I am aiming for. It is almost as though the author has looked at what i am trying to do, then sat down and written an example or two of how I can accomplish it!

If I could only recommend one VB 6 book, this would be it. Great stuff.