Rating: 
Summary: I wish I could give this Ten Stars -- it is well deserved.
Review: I wish I could give this Ten Stars -- it is well deserved.Let's face it Visual Basic, by design, has many pitfalls, walls and cages -- with Matt Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6 any developer can be free to design creatively without keeping track of what they can and cannot do. This book is a must for Software Engineers developing in VB. After reading many books on Visual Basic and growing utterly exhausted by the phrase "beyond the scope of this book" I have finally found a VB book that caters to the Visual Basic Developer who needs to extend VB beyond the basics and bring professional quality level applications/components to the Windows Market. The techniques offered are not only applicable to 'everyday programs', but also absolutely indispensable for creating VB applications with a fully professional look and feel. For any Software Engineer who grew up writing Windows applications in C or COM components in ATL and who want to parlay that knowledge in the Visual Basic Environment, this book will take you there and beyond. The text on the infamous VBized TypeLibrary is the only concise writing I have ever come across that fully defines what Visual Basic does when you add to an existing interface and rebuild as well as what you can do to prevent additional Interface IDs from being created. For large development teams sharing components, the binary compatibility tools, included on the CD, are worth the price of admission alone. The binary compatibility tools is a must for any large extended VB project, and the post-build pieces give you simple point and click control over your finished product -- including elimination of external typelib dependencies and changing default interfaces. I cannot say enough just how much this book has been a great addition in the development of new components and applications.
Rating:
Summary: Immediate Classic
Review: I've been looking for a great book about Visual Basic for years. This is it. Out of several hundred books in my computer library, this is one of my five favorites. Curland's immediate classic belongs with Richter on Windows, Box on COM, Rector and Sells on ATL, and Shepherd and Wingo on MFC. I read the book straight through once, and then settled in for a careful study. Advanced Visual Basic read better than many novels, revealed to me the internals of the language, and deepened my understanding of COM. Congratulations, Matt!
Rating: 
Summary: What the hack...
Review: If for the book or the author's knowledge per se, I will give it a five star (probably 7 stars). However, for the usefulness, I can only give 3 (probably 2, but it's too cruel..). IMHO, if VB becomes too complicated (as it already did), it betrays its 'basic' origin and its RAD name. And it seems that some people think it's not complicated enough, so they like to hack... sigh. Maybe it's one reason that these days so many great scripting languages appear (e.g., python, etc) and many programmers (new or old) converted to the new stuff. Sometimes I think I should stick to C/C++ and get deeper into it and don't waste my time to other languages. If one could spend time to hack in VB, why don't one just program some specific parts in C++?? That's really what I did. I started to learn VC++ (and ATL) more. (Hack, no MFC anyway...)
Rating:
Summary: The title/subtitle is accurate!!!!!!
Review: Matthew Curland is a world class Windows programmer and he really knows about VB6. Skilful people like Mathew Curland mostly write about the Windows platform in terms of C++. But Matthew Curland takes VB to the same level as any other recognized authority in the progr. book market. This guy seem to know secret things about VB runtime that no other available source has ever shared with the many VB users. And he is not just showing of. The book is actually accompanied with some very nice source code that I myself are prepared to use in real life projects. The list of key topics is too long to present but it is exciting, unique and do not exist anywhere else (MSDN, other books). It's a heavy book! Not like other VB books measured in size, but in style. Many chapters present really hard core techniques so be prepared to study the book (read the source code) very carefully. But I feel the return is worth the effort. After reading this book I am converting C++/ATL binaries into VB source code to minimize DLL dependencies. This is stuff I created in C++ because I never imagined VB would stand a chance doing it right. In short its a *GREAT* book and I am not even half finished 'stealing' all Matt's great code.
Rating:
Summary: I agree with dragon999
Review: Strips VB of its RAD importance. I found that way of teaching not to be the best one. I wanna learn and be able to do things, not to use the Author's VBoost objects. I learn to build the object itself so I can change it later when VB changes. Felt like advanced C/C++ book. As I read further I started seeing less immediate practical application for my personal use. However, the advanced information on the book is priceless and can't be found anywhere else; I will probably go back to the book after I read other advanced VB books with things I can immediately apply when developping, say, a database application. Very good info though.
Rating: 
Summary: The title does not lie, this is a very advanced VB book
Review: The title does not lie, this is a very advanced Visual Basic 6.0 book. When I was studying for the 2 Visual Basic 6.0 certification exams (which I passed with flying colors), this book provided me with advanced features of Visual Basic. Although the book is not really a reference book, the more experienced or advanced developer will find useful solutions in this book. I highly recommend this book for those experienced developers. This book should not be read by developers who are trying to learn Visual Basic because the subjects discussed in this book may confuse them.
Rating:
Summary: The title does not lie, this is a very advanced VB book
Review: The title does not lie, this is a very advanced Visual Basic 6.0 book. When I was studying for the 2 Visual Basic 6.0 certification exams (which I passed with flying colors), this book provided me with advanced features of Visual Basic. Although the book is not really a reference book, the more experienced or advanced developer will find useful solutions in this book. I highly recommend this book for those experienced developers. This book should not be read by developers who are trying to learn Visual Basic because the subjects discussed in this book may confuse them.
Rating:
Summary: Makes Hardcore VB seem like VB for the Clueless!
Review: There have been very few books that can be said to redefine a product. If you are reading this review, then you have found such a book. Matt Curland is someone who you could say has forgotten more about VB than most people will ever know, but you would probably be wrong, because he never seems to forget anything! When I first looked at the table of contents it was like Matt literally took every single thing that a pundit or other author claimed was impossible in VB and then without fanfare and without attitude proved them all wrong. A developer who works for me, on first reading, said it "Makes Hardcore VB seem like VB for the Clueless!", and I think she was completely correct. Its almost like an SDK for VB! From function pointers to cdecl calls to string handling to lightweight objects to multithreading to the amazing typelib editor (something that even the C++ folks never managed to come up with!), there is not a single page of this book that is not worth the full price. This book makes VB6 a whole new product, and if you own VB6 but do not have this book, then you are really missing out on the best of what Visual Basic has to offer.
Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: This book came to me so highly recommended by people I truly respect, but as a developer whose job it is to deliver software solutions on time and within budget, it's hardly useful at all. The folks who touted this book so highly to me are all C programmers who seem to view VB as a necessary evil for occasional RAD projects, but I'm not in that school of thought. The real title of this book should have been "How to Trick VB into behaving more like C by writing code that's just as excruciating." Sure, you can do that, but then you miss the main advantage of VB over C, namely the capability to deliver maintainable software to your client in a fraction of the time (and cost) it would take for some oh-so-perfect system to be written in C. Save this for the super hard-core projects that can't be handled any other way. And while you're at it, if you're going to keep things so complicated, you might as well just write in C.
Rating:
Summary: Keyhole Surgery Approach to Windows and COM Programming
Review: This book even surpasses the possibilities of McKinley's "Hardcore Visual Basic". You almost gain the power of C/C++ type Windows and COM programming.
This book is not easy to read. You do need a C level expertise on Windows' and COM's inner working. Though no ATL or MFC is required.
I did learn a lot of the apparently strange behavior of VB. It is now clearer to me. But should you really apply those grandiose tricks. (For proper clean up purposes you should not hit the stop button anymore.) The answer is the same as for optimization. Don't do it! But if I am really in need? Don't do it! ... After at least ten iterations including solid peer review you might try it. The author makes it pretty easy. The book has a CD with an excellent and well modularized library and lots of example code.
Is this book still relevant after the advent of VS.Net? I think so yes. It is an intellectual joy to read this book. (Why couldn't I read it 1996?) We and many other institutions still write a lot of code in VB 6. Anyhow this probably was my last book on VB 6.
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