I came from the environment of the line numbered GW Basic and even "Shingo" Basic after taking a class in Basic programming at the local junior college in the late eighties. After that I learned QuickBasic on my own. QuickBasic was a programming language developed from Basic that incorporated the structured programming techniques and some of the commands and ideas used in more professional languages like C, and I forget what else. I wrote some moderately complicated programs of eight or nine hundred lines and then I didn't do any programming for years. When I returned a couple of years ago I discovered that what was now the state of the art for the amateur programmer was Visual Basic. I took a look at the program (a stripped down version that came with Word Perfect) and was absolutely flabbergasted. I could not figure out how to even begin writing a program!

So I went to the bookstore and found several shelves of Basic books. I tried one (I don't recall the title) but found it so lacking in information and guidance (for the price) that I actually took the book back the next day and got a refund. Some other books were entirely too advanced and too specialized for my needs. Then I tried this generic title, and with help from doing the exercises in Reselman's and Peasley's book, it brought me up to speed in Visual Basic enough to write a program to keep track of some stock market data that I was interested in.

What this book does not do that I wish a Visual Basic book would do is include an equivalence table in which the old commands from the world of QuickBasic are paired off with the new commands, and a one-for-one comparison of the old and new ways of doing things. This would be very handy for those of us who learned our Basic some years ago. I looked around for such a book but without luck.

Fortunately many things have not changed. The random number generator works the same, for example. The techniques and commands for using sequential files, for another example, are vitually the same. The really startling changes are in the way information is presented on the screen. If you're like me and haven't done any programming lately, you will probably find yourself facing a brand new learning curve here.

This book begins with an introduction to Visual Basic 6 and the concept of object programming in Part I, followed by practical guidance in Part II, and then in Part III introduces the reader to scripting and using Visual Basic for Internet programming. Part IV is Visual Basic for Applications, which I didn't get to, and Part V is a reference. The various chapters are taken from other Sybex publications such as e.g, Steve Brown's Visual Basic 6 In Record Time.

In the old days, the "quick and dirty" way to really learn a programming language was to jump right in with a project and get it to work. However, like the "spaghetti code" techniques of old, such an approach will not work well if one wants to write complex programs. So I found that there is no substitute for laboriously learning a significant portion of the commands and techniques before actually trying to write a program. Writing small programs guided by experts is the best way, and that is why I do not recommend any single book for the beginner. I recommend instead that this book be purchased as complement to another book, again Practical Visual Basic 6 mentioned above would be adequate. That way if one explanation or guidance is not entirely clear, you can have the advantage of another writer's approach.

Bottom line is the Visual Basic program itself, a way to interface and develop programs in concert with Microsoft's Windows that will astonish you with its power. Or at least it astonished this old weekend programmer.