Rating: 
Summary: the best book for beginning
Review: this is the excellent, the excellent book for a person who have never touched programming, although after reading it you can not design a perfect program, but it provides strong basis for you, this book may be of little help to those who are already familiar with programming
Rating: 
Summary: Good foundation for real beginners.
Review: Unfortunately this reader was not a total beginner. However this book did provide me with a pretty good review of the programming classes during my college days. Many of the concepts explained can be applied to other languages. If you are an absolute beginner, I would recommend this book. Otherwise, if you have a working knowledge of general programming concepts and can write pseudo-code or if you know what pseudo-code is!, I would suggest skipping to a more advance tome. BTW, the author's attempt at humor was pretty bad.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Starting Ground for Visual Basic
Review: Very easy-to-understand format for a difficult subject. I had never touched VB before reading this book and was able to create simple programs within a few days. Unlike the Microsoft books, this book assumes no understanding and explains everything in detail, which is what I needed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for the basics, but just.
Review: Visual Basic 6 for Dummies was the first book I purchased to learn the fundamentals of VB. I have since purchased Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Step-by-Step and have recently ordered an intermediate level book, which I have not yet received. Because it was my first book on VB and I had no experience programming, I was able to get a lot from this book. I have since found that many of the methods and techniques, such as communicating with databases using the Data object (the only technique presented), to be too limiting for good programming. Sure, the techniques work, but I feel that if you're going to write real-world programs you need more depth, even as a beginner, than this book offers. But let's be fair. I'm a technical kind of guy who wants to learn as quickly as I can. This book has its good points, too. It is written in a style that is easy for non-technical types to stay interested and learn programming at a reasonable pace. I found the examples to be easy to follow and the explanations adequate while sometimes sketchy. The author uses humor, often pretty corny, to make it fun to read and his examples are written such that he rarely leaves you wondering how to use what you have just learned. If you are a true beginner with VB and want to learn some basic concepts without going too deep, this is may be a good book for you. If, however, you are looking to get in at a quicker pace and learn more flexible programming approaches, you may want to consider something else.
Rating:
Summary: A book more suited for Revising VB Basics
Review: Visual Basic for dummies is more suited for revision of VB Basics. This was the first VB Book I bought and frankly, I could not make much out of it. The book did not show us how to apply the concepts to real world applications and as a result, I bought a Step by Step VB Book from Microsoft and this book was much better. However, I stopped programming in VB for some time and I needed to refresh the basics before going on to more advanced topics. This is where I recommend Visual Basic for dummies. Its short code and explanations effectively refreshes my mind. I will recommend this book for people who have mastered the basics and just want to revise the basics of VB again. For true novices, I recommend getting VB Step by Step from Microsoft Press.
Rating:
Summary: First Visual Basic book
Review: When I was trying to make the upgrade from Visual Basic 4.0 to Visual Basic 6.0, this was the first book that I bought. This book is very easy to read and there are ample examples to illustrate each principle that the author is trying to teach you. I combined this books with the 4 "Learn to Program Visual Basic" books by John Smiley to give me a solid foundation in Visual Basic 6.0. The cartoons in this book will reduce down the stress of trying to learn something new. Now that I am moving into .Net technology, I really appreciate how good this book was for people who have little or no experience with Visual Basic. This should be your first Visual Basic 6 book. By the way, Visual Basic 6 and the legacy source code that goes with it will be around for years to come.
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