Rating: 
Summary: too much hype
Review: The first few chapters made me think this was a great book. I even enthusiastically recommended it to friends. However, by the time I got to Chapter 9 I was pretty disappointed. It becomes an exercise in copying the code without any good explanation. I'm now reading Gary Cornell's VB6 from the Ground Up (recommended in one of the previous reviews) which is far superior. I can't understand all the praise heaped on this book.
Rating:
Summary: Just do as I say.
Review: I have made it to chapter 8 and have given up on this book. Each chapter has the same form: Overview, sample program(s), closing. The sample programs only tell you to 'type this exactly as I have and dont worry about what it does.' On the chance that the book tells you what the command does, it wont tell you much. There is no index of the commands with useage.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for Beginners, very thorough simple discussions
Review: Beginning Visual Basic 6 is just that, a book for Beginners. With zero programming experience you can delve right into meddling with complex GUI interfaces that will astonish any hard-core unix programmer. Of course, he doesn't go into detailed analysis of every bitty control, and that is explained in the intro. My only quip with this one is that, as with most beginners books, there is too much unnecessary hand-holding. At times, the steps of operating VB6 are more in-depth than the actual programming; which means it will prolly be a longer read than you're expecting with slower results. But the lessons are quite effective at introducing us newbies to the VB6 interface...preparing us to delve into the sticky MSDN help files for VB6. A very nice read, I recommend it.
--PulsarFT
Rating:
Summary: Overall an excellent book, but there is one main criticism
Review: I am a struggling computer science student who needed some serious help with vb programming. I found the book provided clear explanations with relevant examples. However I struggled with the exercises at the end of the chapters, not through a lack of understanding, but due to the fact that your exercises required the use of predefined functions which had not already been covered in the book. Despite this problem I did learn a lot more about vb.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book for beginners
Review: I loved this book. It is packed with code examples and detailed explanation of the code.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your money, and most of all, your time...
Review: I bought this book because of all the great reviews it got here. Unfortunately, it proved to be a disappointment. After reading over the reviews again I saw one that summed up my frustration. Someone complained that the only thing one can learn from this text is to mimic the author. It does not give you the skills necessary to really accomplish anything on your own. I think all of the other positive reviews this book got were from people who still don't quite grasp what they're doing but don't realize it. I eventually found an outstanding book called "Visual Basic 6 from the Ground Up" by Gary Cornell. I highly recommend that book a worthwhile alternative to Begining VB 6. My biggest gripe is that I didn't start there to begin with.Don't believe the hype.
Rating:
Summary: Great book - for beginners
Review: This is a great book for someone who knows nothing or very little about visual basic and wants to get started. The author's explanations are very clear and easy to follow and you can learn a lot from this book. The things he does cover - most of the basics - he covers very well. Here's what it is not good for: 1. Learning enough to write any kind of serious program. Advanced subjects such as ActiveX and OLE are discussed, while basics such as printing on a printer are not covered well. 2. It is a very poor reference book. Things are not logically organized - for instance, file handling is covered in the chapter on dialog boxes. Also, there are limited lists of properties and methods listed for various objects and the index should contain many more items. The appendix does not contain the expected charts of information that are typical of a book on a computer language.
Rating:
Summary: Hmmmmm - needs work
Review: Peter Wright obviously is a very intelligent guy, I bet he learns very quickly too. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be able to pass on his knowledge. In depth explanations, this book is NOT. IF you really want to LEARN VB this isn't the right book. If you want a book that allows someone to show off their talent, then, this is the book. I think Mr Wright needs to understand one thing, just because your good at something doesn't mean you can teach it. I think this book is more an intermediate level book. .....
Rating:
Summary: Bad for beginners
Review: The book is objectively bad. Consider the following: 1. 'With' is used on page 198, but not explained until page 252. This kind of look-ahead is common in the book. I have to admit, I am perplexed as to how beginners can put up with kind of thing and still praise the book. 2. The 'B' (for box) parameter is used in the line method on page 249 but is never documented anywhere in the book. This is not the only case of features used but not explained. Same perplexity as above. 3. The author says "remove the line .X=0" in the code on page 253 when doing so is wrong. In fact, almost all of the program examples contain bad programming practices of one kind or another. Here I would not expect beginners to realize what is being done to them. 4. The discussion of what structured programming is on page 236 is incorrect and implies that programs can be either structured or object oriented but not both. There are other offline discussions of the 'culture' of the programming effort that are simply incorrect. Beginners wouldn't be expected to know and perhaps don't care about this but I do. I would give the book negative stars if I could.
Rating:
Summary: Starts off good, but rapidly becomes confusing
Review: I bought this book hoping to learn some of the basics of Visual Basic 6, simply for my own enjoyment. However, as I get deeper into it, I am finding that it is becoming increasingly frustrating. Tools are introduced with little to no explanation, code is tossed at you with the simple moniker, "trust me" and there is no comprehensive reference or index in which you can look up more information on something of interest. There is also very little information on trouble-shooting buggy code. Basically (no pun intended) I am not very happy with this book.
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