Visual Basic Programmer's Library

Rating:
Summary: Confusing, inconsistent, and too often wrong
Review: The book promises to be a great help for whatever programming objective one might have. However, the repetitive style of the book soon becomes annoying for the experienced coder, the theory describing the code not always corresponds to the actual code, many variables are declared and are not used, some described methods for working with forms are not correct (for ex., drag-and-dropping to move controls into frames), too many bugs makes one spend a lot time correcting the code and, worse of all, the included CD-ROM does not have the same code as that listed in the book. Too bad, the idea of presenting a group of programming tasks to carry out common needs is great, but the book wastes this opportunity.

Rating:
Summary: Confusing, inconsistent, and too often wrong
Review: The book promises to be a great help for whatever programming objective one might have. However, the repetitive style of the book soon becomes annoying for the experienced coder, the theory describing the code not always corresponds to the actual code, many variables are declared and are not used, some described methods for working with forms are not correct (for ex., drag-and-dropping to move controls into frames), too many bugs makes one spend a lot time correcting the code and, worse of all, the included CD-ROM does not have the same code as that listed in the book. Too bad, the idea of presenting a group of programming tasks to carry out common needs is great, but the book wastes this opportunity.

Rating:
Summary: Even the CD interface, itself is buggy! (fatal error)
Review: The first thing I did when I got this book was to pop in the accompanying CD to find an annoying bug: the main window allows the user to resize and hide the button to continue. Minor annoyance? Maybe, but read on, it gets worse.

Next, I choose to click the button that (supposedly) copies the files from their cd to my hard drive, and it crashes and dumps me out of their program. These guys can't write the rudimentary code to copy files, but they're supposed to teach me something? (but wait, there's more)

After manually copying the cd, I opened their first example program from chapter 2 (CD player). The stop button acts erratically, and is generally buggy.

I have to admit that I didn't go much further. If they can't check their work past this, they don't deserve my money. No more "Jamsa Press" books for me.

Rating:
Summary: Even the CD interface, itself is buggy! (fatal error)
Review: The first thing I did when I got this book was to pop in the accompanying CD to find an annoying bug: the main window allows the user to resize and hide the button to continue. Minor annoyance? Maybe, but read on, it gets worse.

Next, I choose to click the button that (supposedly) copies the files from their cd to my hard drive, and it crashes and dumps me out of their program. These guys can't write the rudimentary code to copy files, but they're supposed to teach me something? (but wait, there's more)

After manually copying the cd, I opened their first example program from chapter 2 (CD player). The stop button acts erratically, and is generally buggy.

I have to admit that I didn't go much further. If they can't check their work past this, they don't deserve my money. No more "Jamsa Press" books for me.

Rating:
Summary: Great for getting started on some applications
Review: This book is a great start to creating some of the infinite types of real world apps. After every function comes a description of what it does. The only drawback however is that i had to read some of the chapters several times, especially the chapter on DCOM, partly because i'm inbetween being a beginner programmer and an intermediate programmer. The beginning of each chapter gives a synopsis of the situation, which can help create the algorithm needed to solve the problem at hand. In the end of each chapter is some suggestions on what can be added to the program, as well as a summary of the things learned. One last thing, the introductions to each of the chapters can get quite confusing.