The entire national chain of training schools COMPUTER LEARNING CENTER used this book as their introductory text for Visual Basic 6. The students learned with ease and developed indepth understanding of the different topics. The debugging exercises were particularly useful! It the text book of choice when I teach!

Programming With Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 by Diane Zak is probably one of the best beginner programming books I have come across. It is easy to read and follow, which for beginners is an important feature to take into consideration. A nice extension to the book is that the sample code for the tutorials are available via download from their web site so if you seem to get stuck in an area more than likely they have some form or another of that code working so you can at least see what it is supposed to do. The only group I would not recommend this book to is intermediate/advanced VB programmers because the book does move a little slower than others, and it can become repetitious by time you get to the 3rd lesson of a tutorial. After nearly completing this book I can see why my University would select this book.

This is a "from the ground up book" that introduces the extreme basics and takes you step by step through the lessons to the point where you can be writing simple programs within a few days or hours depending on how much time you spend at it. The review is missing a star because I was getting some what bored because it is so specific on so many things in the first half, but got better towards the end. The lessons force you to actually write the code and test and debug programs that accompany the book. You go to www.course.com and enter the ISBN number and download the student files. -The authors' approach to writing this book is unmatched. I also recommend "An Inroduction To Programming With C++" by the same author.

First, the price: almost $51 (plus shipping, of course). You can find books that cover way much more material for less than this.

Second, the structure of the book. It is clear that the author's objective was to make it practical, and by grabbing several sample cases which are actually fun to implement, she gradually introduces user to the different objects (with their properties), functions, and methods available to the VB6 developer.

This sounds OK, and for the first few pages (or classes) it is, but once you are past the point where you're no longer a begginner, it becomes a textbook which organizes information in a way that's very hard to go back to. The same function (the MsgBox function, for example) is covered several times within the book, each time going into a little more detail, and sometimes, in a very out of context way with respect to the material being dealt with at that point in the book.

Although the author spends a lot of effort to describe step-by-step (in a fool-proof way) what the user has to do in order to add an object, change its propertis, etc. the book doesn't cover well at all (or in a consistent way, at least) how the user can better exploit the hotkeys or shortcuts VB6's IDE has to offer in order to boost productivity and efficiency.

As for practice, each tutorial (that's how the sections are callled) contains exercises that refer the user to the Student Disk. Although the book comes with a CD (which happily contains the Learning version of VB6) I have yet to find any of the exercises mentioned, or the so-called Student Disk. At the end of each tutorial, the book contains a set of questions and exercises. The exercises are very good to practice the skills learned within the tutorial, but the questions deal with far too much theory, and sometimes become a little too repetitive, in my opinion.

In general, I'd say the book (and in this I agree with most of the reviews here) is OK for a very early learning stage, but past the first few days/weeks learning VB6, it is not the type of book you feel like going back to, because of the way it is organized and the lack of detail with which some topics are covered, which is definitely the largest downside it has. I will always need another reference book by my side to compensate for the book's shortcomings.

Sure the book doesn't appeal to some, but that is always true. Diane Zak knows her topic and it shows throughout the book. Yes it does repeat quite a bit, but isn't that exactly how we learn, by repeatedly doing a task. If you want to learn VB6, this is a very good place to start. The book is used as a text in my district's community college, that is why I chose it in the first place. I have not been disappointed. I have been programming in other languages for years and I am generally self-taught. This book allows me to continue in that direction. But, hey, if you get a chance recommend it to your community college, I would!!