Amazon Review
Written by a team of VB experts from the U.K. who call themselves the Mandelbrot
Set, the second edition of
Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 covers topics
central to effective enterprise development. Chapters on project management, debugging,
and testing and coding styles can help you get control of the project life cycle
in Visual Basic. Other sections provide expert advice on using business objects,
databases, exception handling, and other topics that extend the reach of today's
Visual Basic. Besides being written in a lively style,
Advanced Microsoft Visual
Basic 6.0 imparts a good deal of technical knowledge you aren't likely to
find anywhere else, including material on Y2K programming.
--Richard Dragan
Customer Reviews...
Decent book, but lots of 'too specific' information., August 11, 1999
Reviewer: Jim Tessier (jtessier@cs.uml.edu) from Lowell, MA
This book has a few good chapters in it "On Error GoToHell" - on errors,
"Minutiae" on compiler options andother usually overlooked Visual
Basic optimizations, "Well, at Least it compiled OK!" on testing,
"Starting With Bases Loaded" on base code, "Mixing Languages
with Visual Studio" and "Didn't I Write That Function Last WeeK?"
on code reuse. I didn't read the chapters on IIS, databases and CE (if I wanted
a book about these subjects, I would buy one). The most surprising chapters
dealt with enterprise development and "How to Find, Recruit, and Retain
Great Developers" which were just plain out of scope. TMS authors' should
write about VB6 in a VB6 book. Those chapters should be elsewhere - maybe a
management book. I also did not like the Accessibility in Visual Basic chapter
which dealt with making your programs for disabled people. Also, the dating
and programming with variant chapters were frivolous and not "advanced"
at all.
if you think you know VB, Read this, April 8, 2000
Reviewer: Roy Osherove from Israel
If you think you have learned VB for all it's worth, Take a browse through some
of this book's fascinating chapters (especially the first one) for a glimpse
of VB techniqes like youve never thought of before. Even though i am an MCP
in VB (70-176 & 70-175) and have been programming for a while in it, I could
still find very good tips about everything, starting from Error handling techniqes
such as "Error handling as transaction processing" or "Smart
data types -Smarties". The writing is pretty funny at times, but is to
the point.It DOES assume you know VB and and Object Oriented basics, and have
been writing small-medium sized software for a while before reading it. There
is a very nice chapter about the principles of programming for the WINDOWS CE
interface which was illuminating.
This is something i keep for reference on my shelf in our company offices and
every once in a while i would remember a good solution to something were working
on and look it up .
The 1st chapter alone is worth the price of admission, and has changed the
way i program drastically, giving me power tips and advanced techniqes no programmer
should go without.
Stuff like "How to trace call stacks after compilation" and the "ERL"
function have really made my day. "How to use assertions" is one of
the better guides to program code that tests itself.
Cool information about extended use of API and subclassing, plus some of the
undocumented functions of VB and a few undocumented API functions as well.
(p.s If you don't know what ERL means, it returns the line No. of an error
and is undocumented..except this book)
In short, Buy it.