Rating: 
Summary: How many errors could possibly be in one book.
Review: I'm almost completed with this book and although it helped me in learning VB I am disgusted with the amount of errors and typos in this book. The website of the publisher www.osborne.com claims to post the errors. I went there and found two corrections while there should have been an entire web page to list all of them. Gary Cornell needs to go back to grammer school and learn how to proof read. Computer books are not cheap and while some errors are acceptable this is a disgrace.
Rating: 
Summary: Really needs proofreading, not a beginner's book !
Review: After buying the book and spending a lot of time reading,I only picked up some little ideas, alhough I'm not a novice programmer and have been using visual basic 6 occasionally, I find this book un-appealing. Some pages are distorted with icons appearing which makes the page unreadable. The binding is poor, the pages and the book in general is too bulky, and focuses much on graphics object. The book discusses some note on database programming, but it failed to highlight the most important parts like ADO and multiple table joins. If you really need to have a book for self-studying and have lots of money to spend, I suggest you buy Sam's Teach yourself visual basic 6 in 21 days to get your money's worth. Gary Cornell failed to lay out the foundations of Visual Basic to some novice programmers like my friends. I should know because I've been monitoring their progress .
Rating:
Summary: This book needs some proofreading
Review: I don't know about the later editions, but I (unfornately) got one of those earliest editions of this book from some book club, and it is very annoying to see all the typo's, defective printings and careless syntax errors. As a few examples, Page 191 has a bunch of icons printed on top of the texts that make the entire page unreadable. Page 473 has the word "folllowing". Page 487 has a property definition begins with "public property" but ended with "end sub". I think the least Mr. Cornell can do is to run a spell checker and make sure the codes do run. I give it a 3-star because the book cannot be that good if the author is that irresponsible. After all, what would anyone think of this review of mine if I cannnot spel my words corecctly?
Rating: 
Summary: good, but could use more online support
Review: Generally speaking, this is a very good book for individuals to learn VB. And it _IS_ a book for beginners as well as intermediate learners. But the book has its flaws. The first part of the book is a little bit boring. Too much ink is spent on the IDE and there are two reasons that make it unnecessary: 1. For a beginner, that much information is too overwhelming; but for an experienced user, that information is useless. 2. The different parts of the IDE are explored and explained in later chapters with connection to actual situations, so the beginning chapters are unnecessary. The author's intention was to give the readers a taste of the power win API, but the "most powerful" SendMessageA code was full of rediculous errors and it would not work at all after I fixed all the obvious ones... And the code package downloaded from osborne does not include this example. Try to reach the author himself, but could not find his website or his email address... so much for the win 32 API's... Another problem, which may not be a problem for experienced vb programmers, is the author's frequent use of variant type functions (especially the Str() function instead of Str$()). Surely variant functions are handy, but it could lead beginners into bad programming habits. But the book is still good. The author took time to explain the use of those common controls, and he also picked some odd controls (msFlexGrid) and explained those in details. Later on, he went into topics such as building context sensitive helps, database and SQL's, ActiveX, and Pack-n-Deploy wizard.
Rating:
Summary: Visual Basic 6, From The Ground Up
Review: This book is difficult to follow and tedious. By the time you get to write code, you can't figure out how to get them to run. Even though I have some programming experience, I found this book to be of limited value.
Rating: 
Summary: I would not recommend this book to anyone
Review: Hi everyone, I am a computer science student at University of Maryland Univ College and this book was the textbook for the introductory Visual Basic course. Some students that I know returned the book after a few weeks but most of my classmates ended up buying different books because the book does not explain anything clearly or concisely. Second of all the book is not easy to follow, meaning it will stop short of a topic and that will be it. And if your trying to learn something, it gets frustrating and you start to wonder why there's no more explanation. What the author does do is give you code that you can copy if you want. I had a Visual Basic 5 book lying around by Alan Eliason and Ryan Malarky, QUE Press, and that book is the only thing that got me by that semester. A Student from Maryland
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners as the title suggests
Review: If given the opportunity, I would have Mr. Cornell go back and make the entire manual flow like the first six chapters. I was fairly confident as I waded through those first chapters because the author proceeded slowly and explained everything. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like a different writer took over. The book is also extremely wordy. Not a good attribute for a manual like this. I think the people using this manual want to find information fast and read it fast. Instead, you have to wade through miles and miles of verbage to pick out what you need. There are also too many tips, notes, and cautions. They get in the way. As a reader, you start ignoring them after awhile. Mr. Cornell is obviously very knowledgeable. He provides lots of helpful hints to improve efficiency. This is just not an appropriate book for beginners.
Rating:
Summary: Utterly Nonsense.
Review: If you bought this book because it is written by co-author of the classic Core-Visual basic, you would be utterly disappointed. While it may be good for a novoice, if you are experienced VB programmer this book is a useless stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Good Overview/2nd Book on VB
Review: I agree with the reader that states this is a good 2nd book on VB. I found it helpful for picking up on the author's ideas on good programming style and for learning some things I had missed when I began using VB. There are some typos and small errors in code, but otherwise this a good book. I think that for the beginner it may be a little too vague.
Rating:
Summary: Good SECOND book on VB
Review: If you are a VB beginner, start with Halvorson's VB6 Step by Step, then get this one. This book is quite wordy, but is does give excellent advice to take you to an intermediate level. Cornell is obviously experienced, and he gives some good advice for 'good programming practice' and 'efficiency'. These skills are needed for professional programming, but get in the way if you are a beginner. If you want to go into DB programming, this is the wrong book for you. I understand John Connell's 'Beginning VB6 DB Programming' book is good, I just ordered it.
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