OK, here is a brief review of the book “Programming Visual Basic 6.0 by Francesco Balena”.
First, let me say that the book is almost 1300 pages long, and that I have not read every single line in it yet.
The book starts out as many similar do. The author provides you with an explanation of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and explains the different windows you will see. He then progresses on to the “First Project”, which gets the user to build a small easy project, and allows them to get comfortable with using the IDE. Along the way the user is introduced to more and more controls, and their property’s, events and so on.
Chapter 2 has a chart of the life cycle of a form. What form events occur, and in what order. This is very good information.
Chapter 3 covers the “intrinsic” controls. These are the one’s that are shown in the basic “toolbox”. He does not go over every property of each control, but instead highlights the most important things. Later chapters cover the add-on controls.
The great thing about this chapter, and in many other places in the book, is that he points out the many little “tips and tricks” that he has learned over the years. Previously undocumented or little known methods that can allow the user to extract much more out of their applications.
Further chapters cover Variables, Procedures, Collections, and so on. Giving you the building blocks needed to create more robust applications.
Some of the more involved chapters cover Classes and Objects, Databases in general and the ADO data object, Reports, and creating ActiveX components. Later in the book, HTML applications and other net topics are covered.
The last chapter covers some of the API functions in windows. Not all of them, but it gives a great look into the use of API calls and how to integrate them into your projects.
This is an all-around great piece of work. Just in the first hour or so of looking through it, it helped me to modify some existing code in a current project, so that I was able to eliminate about 30 lines of code and several global variables and accomplish the same thing.
Originally, I bought the book to help me design ActiveX controls. I’m still learning on this, but the book has been an invaluable tool for this as well as many other things. ( I just wish I had read all the way through the chapter on developing ActiveX controls before I started. I bashed my head against the wall for a few hours trying to figure out how to get my control to have a drop down combo in the control properties window ( like a listbox control has ), before I read the part in the chapter that tells you that it can’t be done, and then it explains how to use property pages as a workaround... )
The book starts off easy, and builds up to the more complicated subjects. There is something for everyone here. Highly Recommended.
Robert
( Anyone else that wants to add on to this is welcome )
First, let me say that the book is almost 1300 pages long, and that I have not read every single line in it yet.
The book starts out as many similar do. The author provides you with an explanation of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and explains the different windows you will see. He then progresses on to the “First Project”, which gets the user to build a small easy project, and allows them to get comfortable with using the IDE. Along the way the user is introduced to more and more controls, and their property’s, events and so on.
Chapter 2 has a chart of the life cycle of a form. What form events occur, and in what order. This is very good information.
Chapter 3 covers the “intrinsic” controls. These are the one’s that are shown in the basic “toolbox”. He does not go over every property of each control, but instead highlights the most important things. Later chapters cover the add-on controls.
The great thing about this chapter, and in many other places in the book, is that he points out the many little “tips and tricks” that he has learned over the years. Previously undocumented or little known methods that can allow the user to extract much more out of their applications.
Further chapters cover Variables, Procedures, Collections, and so on. Giving you the building blocks needed to create more robust applications.
Some of the more involved chapters cover Classes and Objects, Databases in general and the ADO data object, Reports, and creating ActiveX components. Later in the book, HTML applications and other net topics are covered.
The last chapter covers some of the API functions in windows. Not all of them, but it gives a great look into the use of API calls and how to integrate them into your projects.
This is an all-around great piece of work. Just in the first hour or so of looking through it, it helped me to modify some existing code in a current project, so that I was able to eliminate about 30 lines of code and several global variables and accomplish the same thing.
Originally, I bought the book to help me design ActiveX controls. I’m still learning on this, but the book has been an invaluable tool for this as well as many other things. ( I just wish I had read all the way through the chapter on developing ActiveX controls before I started. I bashed my head against the wall for a few hours trying to figure out how to get my control to have a drop down combo in the control properties window ( like a listbox control has ), before I read the part in the chapter that tells you that it can’t be done, and then it explains how to use property pages as a workaround... )
The book starts off easy, and builds up to the more complicated subjects. There is something for everyone here. Highly Recommended.
Robert
( Anyone else that wants to add on to this is welcome )
