Beginning Visual Basic 6

If you have no Visual Basic experience but have a desire to learn about the language, you'll find Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6 useful. Furthermore, you'll find it useful for more than a week--the author covers advanced problems as well as language fundamentals. He begins with some introductory information about the development environment's interface and moves on to key aspects of the language, such as graphical controls, variables, arrays, loops, and other control structures. The book then explores different kinds of resources, one at a time, before ending with a series of case studies.

Throughout, Wright's style is clear and informed. He often inserts a program's source code into his commentary and then proceeds to examine it in depth. This Talmudic approach proves quite enlightening. His examples aren't overly academic, either. For example, you'll find a database-aware program to manage a library's collection in the text. Indeed, database programming--the bread and butter of professional Visual Basic programmers--is covered very well.

Coverage of ActiveX control creation, one of Visual Basic 6's most important features, isn't as lavish as that of other topics, but real-life Visual Basic development still focuses on stand-alone applications, after all. --David Wall