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Title: Learn to Program with Visual Basic 6 by John Smiley ISBN: 1902745000 Publisher: Active Path Pub. Date: 30 November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46
Rating: 2
Summary: A little disappointed
Comment: I have to say, I'm a little disappointed with this book. After reading the great reviews, I ordered this book from Amazon, and went to the corner bookstore and got myself a copy of the "Visual Quickstart Guide to Visual Basic" to hold me over until my Amazon shipment arrived. I accomplished more advanced things in the first 10 pages of the quickstart guide than this entire book offers.
I know it's an "absolute beginner" guide, and I do have some programming experience with C and Perl on UNIX. But, I'm an absolute beginner to Visual Basic, I haven't programmed on Windows since my DOS/QBASIC/Pascal days in college in the early nineties!
But I was hoping for a "beginner's guide" to Visual Basic, not a beginner's guide to computers. This book is very remedial for anyone who's worked with any type of computer, there's a lot of hand holding. That might help you if you're just starting (and I mean REALLY STARTING OUT), but if you've got a little experience it's going to be annoying.
The writing is in a classroom dialog, and it gets tiresome very quickly. You can easily skip ahead pages at a time while the author goes off on a tangent with entire passages about sending his students on a break, etc. I've been published in the computer security field, and no editor I know would allow me to write like that.
Don't get me wrong, if you have absolutely no idea what RAM or a hard disk is, yet you want to learn VB, then this is your book. But I think that if you've got enough experience to be able to identify that VB is what you want to start doing, then this book is probably beneath you.
Rating: 5
Summary: It's For Absolute Beginners, Folks!
Comment: I am interested in pursuing a career change to the world of programming and have been told by friends in the know that Visual Basic is a good language to start out with for its ease of use compared to other languages and its applicability in the business world today. I therefore went out and bought two different introductory Visual Basic books and Microsoft's Visual Basic learning edition. What I found in reading these books is that they give a good introduction to VB, but then at some point, the authors of the books forget you are a beginner and start introducing topics that seem somewhat advanced with very little explanation. After a while, your head starts to spin and you give up.
I then read some reviews on Amazon.com about other VB books and a lot of folks mentioned the John Smiley series as a good one to start with if you are new to programming and VB. So I picked up his first book. And I'm glad I did. True, the classroom dialog that makes up a fair portion of the book is occaisionally inane, tedious and repetitious. However, if you hear about the same concept again in Chapters 2, 5, 6, 10 and 14, it burns in your head and you aren't as likely to forget it. Generally, this repetition is only for a sentence of two to refresh our memories. But it works. I also think the use of dialog of getting the information communicated allows for a more relaxing way of learning the material than paragraphs chock full of technical data that may take you a half hour just to get through six pages. I agree that you'll probably get more information out of the typical 700 page VB book than Smiley's book, but I'll also bet you aren't as likely to get through that book either, especially if you are a beginner. I was able to get through Smiley's book in less than two weeks at about two hours a night (working through all the many examples he provides). I am currently in the process of skimming the book a second time to strengthen my understanding of some of the tougher concepts of the book (i.e. arrays took a little bit to understand - for me at least).
I have picked up the other three books in the Smiley VB series, which I hope to get through over the next couple of months. Then I might pick up those "beginner" books I started out with again and pick up some more concepts to expand my knowledge base in VB.
Overall, Smiley's book is a great way to start learing VB programming, but only if you are agreeable to a new teaching approach and you aren't expecting to learn advanced concepts in VB.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Firm Foundation
Comment: By trade I work in the industrial controls industry specifically in the food industry. I am an instrumentation/electronics technician and have been one for the last 20 years. I dabbled in programming such as assembly language and gwbasic and even a tiny bit of 'C' code. I decided to focus my learning through the years and decided to learn Visual Basic as a starting point. Although I don't consider myself to be a beginner I found the following to be true about Mr. Smiley's book. I give it a 5 star rating with no hesitation because it provides a strong foundation on which to build on. I found the format from which Mr. Smiley wrote the book to be very intuitive. The method by which questions are asked and then answered in detail with a real life situation application is priceless; it helps to focus your learning instead of some books that just gives you aimless examples. But it doesn't stop there... Mr. Smiley truly loves what he does and it shows in his books; he doesn't leave you hanging. He goes on to recommend additonal readings to further your skills and he provides support on his web site. The book is specifically written with the beginner in mind. You will be please, very pleased if you decide to get started with this book.
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Title: Learn to Program Visual Basic Databases by John Smiley ISBN: 1929685173 Publisher: Muska & Lipman Publishing Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Learn to Program Visual Basic Examples by John Smiley ISBN: 1929685157 Publisher: Muska & Lipman Publishing Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Step-By- Step. by Michael Halvorson ISBN: 1572318090 Publisher: Microsoft Press Pub. Date: 15 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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Title: Learn to Program Visual Basic Objects by John Smiley ISBN: 1929685165 Publisher: Muska & Lipman Publishing Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Learn to Program with Visual Basic.NET by John Smiley ISBN: 0072131772 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Pub. Date: 11 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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