MCSD Visual Basic 6 Exams 70-175 70-176 [With *]

This is the third manual I have used in the pursuit of the MCP Certification in VB6. Overkill? Maybe. IF I had bought this book first, I would not have needed the others. The other 2 were Microsoft Press books (see my other reviews) that when combined, did not even come close to covering the material in this tome in appropriate detail. Although its 1300 pages may be daunting at first, it is packed with useful information for certification and beyond, without a lot of silly fluff. It covers in detail: ActiveX controls, COM components, callbacks, error-handling and debugging, data access, creating user-help, all the way through packaging and deploying your applications via disk, network or web.Beginners beware- this is not the book to start learning VB. Once you have the fundamentals of the language and want to take yourself to the next level with certification, then purchase this book.

Now that I have completed the MDSD certification, I feel qualified to render judgment on the ton of books that I read. This one was simply the best. Many of the books out on the market are of very poor quality - including many that carry the Microsoft "Approved Study Guide" logo and many published by Microsoft itself. This one stands out from the crowd as being comprehensive, on point, well-written and relatively error-free. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the publisher had a web site where error corrections are available. I was initially skeptical about the idea of covering two exams in one book, but it turns out that there is a great deal of overlap between the two exams and it makes a lot of sense to cover all the material in one book. The practice exam software on the CD was realistic, although I wish it had a larger inventory of questions. Supplementing the book with Transcender software is a good strategy. Also, since this book is a bit ponderous, I would recommend the Exam Cram series for a final review.

This was the only book that I used for the exam and I did very well. It is very thorough and covers everything that you need to know for the exams. It does have quite a bit of information if you are experienced in VB, but you can skim over what you already know. I think this would be a good book for someone new to VB because of the detail and sample labs at the end of each chapter.

This book is the best yet published for preparing for exam 70-176, desktop applications. Many books, particularly the Microsoft Press books, cover only a subset of the exam objectives. Hawhee covers them all and covers them with a minimum of fluff. The exercises in Hawhee will help those without VB development experience gain some of the hands-on experience they need to be successful. The exam questions Hawhee includes are quite close in terms of difficulty to what you'll face on the exam. There's two groups of folks who'll probably be unhappy: those who are annoyed by typos and those preparing for exam 70-175, distributed applications. If you're one of those folks who gets annoyed by typos, why not go with a book that doesn't prepare you as well but has fewer errors? You'll be happier. For exam 70-175, there is not yet an adquate exam prep book. You'll want to work with books specifically on MTS, COM and ADO or spend some time with the MSDN docs.