[.ca] Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday ... (ISBN 0201707128)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Written by a Microsoft insider and well-respected VB expert, Matthew Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6 is a unique guide to extending the reach of VB into COM and object design. This compendium of tips and strategies for doing more in Visual Basic is perfect for intermediate to a advanced developers seeking to overcome bottlenecks in performance and functionality in their favourite programming tool. The underlying message is that Visual Basic lets you work more efficiently with Microsoft COM if you implement a few extra routines that look under its hood. A custom library of routines (called VBoost) comes with the book, on the accompanying CD-ROM. Each chapter shows how to use this code, beginning with new ways to use pointers and access COM internals to enhance performance with such features as arrays, strings, threads and classes. The most notable techniques use memory more efficiently (including code that creates large numbers of objects faster). More advanced readers will appreciate the in-depth guide to building COM objects programmatically within VB. (The book shows you how to create lightweight COM objects using custom routines). For the real guru, there's even a section on how to use inline assembly language within Visual Basic. Later sections turn to a host of techniques for multithreading, doing more with windows and how to manage and customise COM-type libraries for successful real-world deployment. Armed with these custom routines and an expert's-eye view of VB internals, you'll be able to get more out of Visual Basic with faster, more versatile programs. --Richard Dragan

What a disappointment!:
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.

The title does not lie, this is a very advanced VB book:
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.

Requires Discipline:
I found this book to be absolutely amazing in terms of the type of power it exposes to the Visual Basic developer. Having said that I want to encourage anyone thinking of buying this book. It is not a book for beginners not by a long shot...if you have been programming in Visual Basic long enough to be frustrated by what cannot be done in VB compared to C++ then it is time to purchase this book...I wanted to point out a few things. First and foremost. The author provides the C++ code for the DLL. You can recompile against the Visual Studio.NET framework and you should be good to go. Second, the changes to VB exposed by .NET will require that more than the authors bridge code be tweaked. In fact Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET have little in common at all. So if you ditch this book and it's code for .NET reasons then ditch VB 6 while you are at it. Last thing. The topics and the examples in this book will give you tremendous insight into Windows Programming. The concepts can easily be abstracted. The author shows you so much about COM, Interfaces, Pointers and memory. If you thoroughly understood the content of this book (which is realistic). You could walk away from Visual Basic 6.0 to a totally different programming language and immediately apply the information this book provides. So if you are ready to study WITH DISCIPLINE. If you are ready to take your Visual Basic Applications to the next level WITH POWER & STABILITY. Then you are ready to buy this book. My hat goes off to Matt Curland for finally providing a book that explains how to use Visual Basic to it's full potential.

Keyhole Surgery Approach to Windows and COM Programming:
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.

By far the best advanced book I've seen for VB6:
I simply can't accept people give below 5 stars for this book - have they read it correctly / reviewed the same book??? It's BY FAR the best I've seen for the advanced user. Everything that you always wanted to do in VB - and it's here! It's an ABSOLUTE must for any serious programmer. This book is on the same level of every VB programmers bible - Dan Appleman's Guide to the Win32 API - if that gives you an idea of how good it is. I can't believe I haven't heard about this book before.