Advanced Visual Basic Small TM/Small Techniques [With Contains All Fully Functioning Applications...]

When I first bought the book I didn't know what to expect but upon reading the first two chapters, I was totally delighted. I found some real world examples that I have been able to use right away. It also showed some tips. It is a good book to have for reference. Some VB programming experience is necessary to fully benefit from this book.

This books presents what programmers need to know. it presents the theory behind the prgramming. Almost all of the books available today stress "tips and tricks" or methods. This leaves programmers high and dry having to buy more books for further ventures. But just like in the old days of prgramming, theory with code is stressed which allows the programmer to adapt code from other areas with these concepts.Excellent work.

An advanced programming book has a difficult goal. It must show programmers, who are already working with a language, techniques that they presumably don't know or of which they don't realize the capabilities. They tend to be weak in a number of ways. They emphasize "tips and tricks" and avoid the harder details. They use code snippets and fragments that need user-supplied code to work. When they present fully coded procedures, they are frequently a set of disjointed routines, which the user is left to weave together. Advanced Visual Basic Techniques by Rod Stephens avoids these areas of weakness. It does this by presenting fully developed systems that demonstrate advanced use of Visual Basic. Better still, it does not avoid the difficulties and details that make the techniques described work. A careful reading through this book covers the areas needed for full mastery of Visual Basic. Chapter one starts with a simple look at field validation and moves directly into dynamic management of controls, including placement after form resizing; creation of controls at run-time; displaying controls in scrollable viewports; printing and print preview; and saving and reading data in files, including all pertinent menus and a "recently used file" menu item. The beauty of this is that these techniques are used in a fully developed application, which shows them in operation. On the Visual Basic newsgroups we see questions on such topics as printer setup, building help files, and use of the Printer Object. The short, specific answers found there are only a start at help. This book is the complete help needed. Rod Stephens covers these topics in chapter two. Again, by showing these topics in use and in detail a reader has all the information needed to use these techniques in his own work. The first two chapters would be a useful book on their own, although it's true that some additional details are continued into chapter three. But there is more! Topics like handling bit-mapped vari!ables, creating rotated fonts, menu handling, and step-by-step procedures for creating Add-Ins make this a complete course for intermediate programmers. The second half of the book tackles subjects that need the kind of in-depth coverage this book gives them. The third section covers database design, queries, and use and splitting a database on a network. A fourth section covers client/server topics. The chapter on Asynchronous Servers, while short, clearly shows concepts that I have found to be major stumbling blocks in class. A final pair of sections gives a brief introduction to ActiveX controls and their use on the Web, including retrieving data from the client-side to the server. Here too, fully operational applications are provided to demonstrate the techniques. Clearly, there is so much here that some aspects must be left out in a book this size, but they are only marginally Visual Basic (such as setup and use of ODBC). Still, the topics that are covered are hard to find els

I bought this book because Windows Magazine (November 1997, pg 104) recommended it!