Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Realistic, Well Thought Out, Easy to Follow
Review: This is the first VB book I have read that was very well planned and thought out, easy to follow and didn't consider advanced VB as accessing a database using forms. This book covers the meat of VB that developers (not college students or programmer hobbyists) need to know to be productive in an actual programming environment. I have tried many other books only to bring them back bacause I couldn't follow their examples because they assumed you would fill in the rest or their examples were so elementary you felt like you were practicing etch -a- sketch on your computer. The book not only explains many of VB's advanced components and topics but it gives you a forest view from a developers perspective and then allows you to hone in on specific aspects of the project. Great , Well thought out, realistic book. Maybe I am just over enthusiatic because the other books were just so bad but I really like Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. Its the best one I've come across yet.
Rating:
Summary: Very good comprehensive coverage of VB6
Review: I am a new programmer fresh out of college and I needed a book to help me face the new VB challenges I have everyday. I have not encountered one problem yet that wasn't dealt with by this book. The OOP and ADO sections are thorough and very easy to understand. Mr. Balena has done an excellent job of covering VB6 broadly from the very basic concepts to advanced techniques. This book is a good investment for VB developers at any level.
Rating:
Summary: The best advanced overview of Visual Basic I've found.
Review: I anticipated this book being an excellent resource for advanced study of Visual Basic programming techniques because of Mr. Balena's frequent high-quality articles in Visual Basic Programmer's Journal. He seems to me one of the very few writers who can really communicate the theory, structure, and problem-solving techniques required to use VB's object-oriented, ActiveX, and Web related functionality ... with enthusiasm and great source code examples that are immediately useful.Studying this book and using and learning from the source code examples, libraries, and classes included on the cd-rom is, for me, like a one-on-one with an ideal mentor. I like his tone, his frequent use of sidebar notes and special explanations. He is, I think, by nature an envelope-pushing kind of a programmer and his solutions to many of the ... odd ... lacunae in VB are immediately useful in real-world problem solving. And they are delivered without diatribes against Microsoft or agenda-ranting. For example, his coverage of the TreeView control, gave me some valuable ideas that I could use right away to solve a problem I was working with in implementing drag and drop. I've found, to my delight, that this is really about six books in one. As an introduction and overview of Visual Basic as a programming language it's excellent and I'd recommend it for any programmer who wishes to evaluate Visual Basic's facilities and structure. As a tutorial on the Object/Class aspects of VB, etc. I found it to be the most lucid writing I've encountered ... and he addresses, with source code examples, polymorphism and inheritance ... areas in VB that have been problematic because VB does not offer true inheritance. I have only begun to skim and study the detailed section on ADO, but I noticed that his explanation of hierarchical recordsets seemed immediately understandable to me in a way that various articles and white papers I've read have not. Book number 4 ... I found Balena's approach to explaining ActiveX and COM, dll's, etc. lucid and clear and very helpful. I personally am not at the level where I can grok Dan Appleman's books, and I felt that Balena's focus ... and the gradated source code examples ... are exactly what I need to increase my competence in this area. And, Book 5 ... I really like Francesco's approach to the new Web features of VB6; there's just enought html content to warm me up to the content on DHTML and he includes his own tools (with source !) for exploring DHTML. Book 6 ... Distributed applications, ASP, IIS Applications. I hope I can get there, eventually. What you have in this book is a kind of a "core dump" by an enthusiastic and innovative programmer who wants you to learn what he knows. Of course, no book is perfect. There are some things on the cd-rom that are mysterious and do not execute as they are obviously designed to do. There is some deficiency in the indexing of the book. The "heroic" scope of the book does leave you wishing for even more detailed coverage of certain areas like the Windows Common Controls, sub-classing, API call-backs, etc. The frequent use of re-dimensioning arrays as a solution to problems of the "sparse matrix" type will raise some questions for programmers hell-bent on memory-conservation. I'm going to be studying and using and having fun with this book and its source code examples for a long, long time. 1250+ pages, 2 megabytes+ of source code : this book has more content than ten of the typical rehashed VB5 books popping out like mangy prairie dogs with VB6 stamped on their foreheads.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book , but sometimes you lose a point
Review: The book sometimes concentrates on not essential explanations so that you lose a general author's point
Rating: 
Summary: Just the Best VB Teacher
Review: Why Did I review a book that is not ready to Sell? Because Mr. Balena is one of the best VB teaches and programmers around the word. I've been reading his articles in VBPJ magazine and they are excellent. I was at VBits'99 Chicago listening to Mr. Balena speak at different Workshops and I asked him if all this good stuff is include in the book and He said, in his Italian accent, " YES!", and the book is huge too (I did not realize it has 1,400 pages). Buy it. I already did. Why Did I give it 4 stars and not five? Because the publisher is Microsoft. :-) Gonzalo Medina
Rating: 
Summary: author shoud be banned from writing programming books
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Best VB 6.0 book I own.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible!
Review: This is mother of all books on VB6! Balena is trully amazing in delivering a hands-on coverage of Visual Basic programming. I have read quite a few books on VB6, but this one is my favorite.
If you're planning to do some serious programming, you owe yourself a copy. And if you find it difficult to spend $30 to get one, you can always go to VB2THEMAX.COM for plenty of free code, tips, tricks and all.
Rating:
Summary: The cream of the crop
Review: 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:
Summary: This is a must read
Review: 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.
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