Rating: 
Summary: I must recommend this book
Review: I have finally found a book that progresses at MY rate. I find that other "Teach Yourself" books usualy stick to basics for 50% of the book, and then dable on a couple of advanced features of VB. Hence you usualy can't use a "Teach Yourself" book as a reference guide, even if they do give you somewhat of a solid base in VB.THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT!!! It explains concepts concisely, clearly and with interest (not dry). This means that many concepts can be conveyed in the shortest space of time. This also allows the reader to progress very quickly to in depth advanced features, which is great if you are already familiar with VB, or other languages. Because of the in depth coverage of advanced VB features, the book is also a very good reference guide. Because the book is so cheap, it must be one of the best investments a person, or company, can have. There are only a small number of drawbacks to the book. Most of these drawbacks occur due to the fact that that several books are combined into this book. This means that various writing and code styles appear which takes a little getting use to. This is definitely one of the GOOD books!!
Rating: 
Summary: Visual Basic 6 Complete
Review: I would like to agree with the general consensus that this is a good book, especially for the price. When facing a wall full of books costing $40 - $50 bucks a wack, it was refreshing to find such an affordable one (frankly, this is a major reason I selected this book). I did find the differing styles of the various authors disconcerting from time to time. For example, an early chapter teaches the wisdom of using [option explicit] to force declaration of variables, but a later author did not follow this practice, leaving the beginning programmer who believes in using [option explicit] trying to figure out the data type and scope of variables used. While this is probably a good way of learning such things, it can be frustrating when you don't know enough to be sure if the source of a problem is with the variable, or some other problem (see next paragraph). The code in the book contains some errors and before the neophyte spends too much time pulling out his hair trying to figure out why the hand-entered code won't work, he would be advised to download the sample files from their website and check them against the book.
Rating:
Summary: This is GREAT!
Review: I'm a student at The University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines. Being a computer science major, I was asked to work for a company to gain experience. The company I worked for required me to make an application to automate their office tasks using VB. Since I don't know anything about VB6 yet, I looked for a book. I chose this book because it's the cheapest. And I was really impressed with this book. It was COMPLETE, easy to understand, and enjoyable to read! So if you're a beginning VB6 programmer and you really want to learn VB, this BOOK is the ONE for you!
Rating:
Summary: A lot of Info for the Price
Review: I've been away from vb for about six months and wanted to find a book to brush up on the subject. This was excellent for that purpose. The only problem I had was that the editing is a little weak. For instance, a variable will be declared but used with a different name in the subsequent code - things like that. If you think there is an obvious mistake, just quit dwelling on it and push on. There are numerous small mistakes that will drive you crazy if you are a perfectionist. If you can live with imperfection :), you will benefit from this book.
Rating: 
Summary: WARNING: Make sure you have at least the VB 6.0 product
Review: If I had looked closer, I would have realized most of the book exercises work ONLY if you have at least the VB 6 product and resources, rather than the VB CCE 5 free version I have. I was unable to follow along hands-on with most of the exercises, so that made this book INCOMPLETE for me and a waste of money. I found it's a little skimpy on some important subjects; for example, developing menus through Menu Editor. A better way I found for myself, and it's FREE, is to register as a Microsoft Developer and go onto the website for lots of real hands-on interactive tutorials including plenty of pictures and examples. Cover a tutorial, notebook paste it if you wish, then experiment with your VB platform. My niece is a top level software executive and she told me to just get in there and code, make mistakes and try it again. I was in the computer industry for a decade, and I agree with this hands-on approach. But I think the RIGHT books, together with hands-on, can facilitate learning. Don't just assume a book is going to be right for you by the ratings here. The RIGHT book should include all of the detail without having to resort to outside resources. I have adjusted my grade for this book to C.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, inexpensive reference
Review: Microsoft has created, deliberately or otherwise, an aftermarket of books that supplement its product documentation: Microsoft, like the traditional computer programmer, seems as a corporation to hate documentation. It now ships manuals on CD and is moving towards placing documentation on the Web, and its help systems are difficult to use. Microsoft deserves thanks from the trees that surround its Pacific Northwest headquarters for not printing manuals, but the new modes of documentation can be difficult to use and distracting. So it's hard to select books on Visual Basic because of the number of offerings. I recommend this book because it's inexpensive and earth-friendly, being printed on lower-grade, apparently recycled newsprint. Don't worry about the permanence of the paper, for it is likely that Visual Basic 7 will render this book useful as a door stopper, or as an anchor for a very small boat. You won't curl up with this baby and read it from cover to cover (unless you're even stranger than me.) It is instead a good book to keep at the office. I recently used it to call the Windows Registry API interface and this book worked fine. The Internet is somewhat overkill for, for example, finding out the syntax of an API call, for the hyperdimensional quality of the Internet, combined with a low span of attention, finds the programmer, who just wanted to find out why his DLL is not registered, scanning www.threeStooges.COM instead. An old fashioned book without much glamour helps to focus on the task at hand, known in some circles as work, and in others as RTFM (Read The Fool Manual.) One issue is the anonymity of the authors. I do hope that this is not a trend. People like to form an image of the author of a book and SOMEBODY wrote this. If it is a bunch of guys in Belarus, let us know who they are. Everybody deserves his 15 minutes of fame.
Rating:
Summary: Completeness traded for Brevity
Review: The book has written on the cover "1,000 pages ONLY $19.99", and it was able to accomplish this because all of the chapters come from other books but that have been editted to be smaller so that they fit. It feels to me like various information was lost in this editting process and the only way to get this missing information is to download the source code and look at that.
Unfortunately, the projects do not seem to open in my version of VB6, and this has made repeating the programs they describe very difficult. I am not certain why the projects won't work, but I suspect that it is because I have upgraded to service pack 6 for VB6 and somewhere along the service pack path, the project files have become obsolete. So if you purchase this book, that is something you will want to be aware of.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book At a fantastic price
Review: This book is a good reference book. Thankfully this is a book that does not waste half the book on Database programming. But this does not cover much Internet programming. BUT A FANTASTIC PRICE
Rating:
Summary: Not Complete
Review: This book started out well. VB6 is introduced in a methodical but interesting format. And then it just shoots off into the authors' "let me tell you about my favorite program" stories. The programs and the commentary are too specific. If you want to get a start on making a screen saver application then this is a good palce to start but applying the material is not placed in the larger context of a more academic and/or useful setting. On the other hand, it is a good marketing idea for Sybex - take a bunch of lengthy books that are questionable in their own right and make an anthology that claims to be complete. It worked once but not again. Customer lost to the competition.
Rating:
Summary: Good Hodgepodge
Review: This books is bits and pieces taken from several others by the same publisher. I've found several of the examples and subjects useful, including those working with accessing databases including Access files from VB. If you like the style of any of these "chapters" you can find the original text and look for THAT full book. The best feature for programmers of earlier Basic language forms is the Reference at the back listing most of the Basic command functions, with syntax and explanations if not examples thereof. That feature has saved me lots of time. If you know Basic from earlier computers, this book will be helpful on that regard alone, as most books twice its price range omit such a reference guide...
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