[.ca] Visual Basic 6 Bible (ISBN 0764532278)

outdated code:
I would not recommend this book for any reason. As I followed the code in creating these projects I encountered numerous bugs. No updates are made available for the code in this book. The bugs occur because of this books dependancies on Visual Basic 5 components. This is rather poor for a book that touts itself as being the Bible for Visual Basic 6. Authors and editors should take the time to at least be sure to use the same components included in the version of VB that they are supposedly supporting. I would reccomend the John Smiley series of books instead. At least his code works and makes for a much more enjoyable read as well.

Worthless doorstop:
If you want screenshots and useless code and tutorials telling you to "click the ComboBox tool, then click to place your ComboBox," you might like this book. For my part, I prefer SUBSTANCE not screenshots and wizard-like walkthroughs. Put it this way: if you think that a book telling people to click on the Start menu is a good way to teach Windows, you'd like this book. If you want to know more details, forget it. Look elsewhere and save the trees. The online help that comes with Visual Basic is *way* more useful, both as a reference and as an introduction -- even if you are completely new to programming. For those reviewers that rated the book highly (notice they are all new to programming) I would suggest that, had you used the Help menu, you would have learned faster. I doubt any experienced programmer would disagree with this opinion.

This book is terrible!:
The most I got out of this book was being able to follow the tutorials that implement the various gadgets and gizmos that VB6 has to offer. While these examples and the concepts they illustrate are good (it's what earned my 1 star), it is absolutely horrible when you need it to implement your own programs. If you're looking for a book that you can use as a reference for your own projects, this is NOT it! Here's an example of what I mean. If you want to know how the combo box control works, for example, you look in the index and find 3 pages on it. The first page (p.79) shows a little blurb that explains what it is. Big whoop!!! Gee that really helps me! The second page listed in the index (p. 86) shows a little paragraph sub-titled "Adding the Combo Box". This tells you basically how to add it as part of the tutorial. That's about it! If I want to know how to use the combo box I have to dig through the book to find the code where it is implemented in the tutorial to see how it is used in that particular example and then hope that it will help me. It's the same for all other controls. In a nutshell, while the book is decent when it comes to explaining VB6 in it's examples, it falls waaay short when you need to quickly look up info on how to use a particular control independent of any particular program. I have been extremely frustrated every time I pick up the book to go back and refresh my memory on how to use the controls. My advice, don't do it! Get another book!

Not very Good:
This book has the right idea about what topics to cover but doesn't cover them in depth enough. Also the editing is HORRIBLE. For instance they talk about how great ADO is but yet seem to use DAO for everything....Seems lazy to me. Also If you get stuck on any code....its probably wrong in the book. The CD at least has the right code.

Next to useless for me:
I too find the code in this book does not work. It's fustrating and time consuming to try to figure out why it doesnt work, so i would say it is useless to me. I need a book where i can move quickly without getting bogged down on non working code. I wasted my money and time on this book. Now i have to look for another.