I finished the book in 14 hours, 15 minutes -- including all of the review questions (usually just a mental affirmation when I knew the answer), plus 10 minutes to set up the included version of VB on my computer.

One of the greatest things about this book is its motivating format. It's a challenge -- learn the essentials of Visual Basic in a weekend!

And it was that challenge, plus the generally very positive reviews at Amazon.com, that motivated me to pick *this* book instead of a different title. Simply put, I decided this past week (because of a couple of opportunities that came up) that I ought to learn VB -- preferably, by Monday!

I finished the book 15 minutes ago, at 11:35 p.m. Sunday night.

My advice: start earlier in the week, and try to get in a bit extra time as you go along. Other matters took some of my time on Saturday and Sunday, and if I hadn't gained an hour and a half on Thursday evening, and half an hour on Friday, I couldn't have finished tonight.

The other great benefit is that Mansfield majors on the things you'll use a lot, and skips the things you'll use less, to produce a package that actually *can* be completed in a short (and hence motivating) time frame. He claims "the VB vocabulary has been carefully surveyed to determine which commands you need to know for nearly all programming." Obviously, I can't verify that from experience -- but throughout the book he seems to know what he's talking about.

Compare my experience in learning VB via this book with, say, my Java expedition: I began an 1100-page Java text almost a year ago, and I'm still stuck on page 257.

Negatives: yes, it could definitely use some better editing, including, in places, editing of the code supplied. For humor, my own favorite example of this was:

--------------------------------------
For I = 1 to Numberofcopies
Printer.Print Text1.Text
Next I

Notice the convention of indenting the code inside a For...Next loop. This graphically illustrates the loop.
--------------------------------------

(Did you see the indentation? Me neither!)

Far less amusing is that the author should've included on page 279 or so the code for cmdNew_Click() that's on page 302. Also, my main finished application didn't behave quite as expected -- and if I'm "keeping to schedule," I didn't have time to debug it (that's OK, I learned enough from it).

Incidentally, though, another reviewer's complaint of illegal names -- as in "1stSearch" (a variable name can't begin with a digit) -- was INCORRECT. The previous reviewer misread the text, which reads, e.g., "LSTSEARCH" (as in LIST BOX) -- *not* "1STSEARCH".

For most chapters, you'll need to use your computer to really follow and learn the material. Unfortunately, the version of VB on the CD-ROM won't allow you to walk through all the steps in some of the final chapters, but the author (obviously knowing this) has provided more screen shots, allowing you to follow along.

A time-saving tip: don't type in the code! Simply cut and paste it from the CD-ROM. Then review it line for line, either from the book pages or on your screen.

A perfect book? No. But all in all, this text got the job done for me. I'm by no means a VB expert after one weekend and 375 pages, but I sure as heck am on my way. I give Mansfield's book a quite solid 4 stars out of 5.