Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies

I needed to take a visual basic course as an elective. Yeah, like a foreign language to a nurse. This book went slow, and really showed in "baby steps" the process, I couldn't have made it through the course without it.

I usually do not buy books for Dummies but at a ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Symposium I heard Bill Sempf speak and after reading his book; I found things in his book that were explained better and with more detail than in the five professional books I bought. I have been programming for 32 years with many different computer languages and now I am working on Visual Studio 2008. I liked the history and the why things are the way they are explained in this book. Dean Liming MBA

The book is written in English rather than computerese, which I appreciate. The inclusion of code examples is critical to learning, and this book's got them. Glad I've got this one.

If your expectation is that you're going to be able to read this book from beginning to end like a novel and find yourself able to write Word or Excel from scratch, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's like taking a semester of weekend classes in Biology 101 and expecting to discover the cure for cancer. If you were interested in bodybuilding as a beginner, would you balk at having to endure muscle soreness and having to sweat? If you're going to butt heads with the topic of programming, you're going to get a headache. There's just no way around it. Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies cannot save you from that process. Nothing can. This isn't the Matrix where you can zap this information into your brain in an instant Let's start with an example: If someone were to write a book called "Neurology for Dummies," (I don't know whether there is such a book, and it doesn't matter.) a purely descriptive digest of information about neurology: history, basic fundamentals, current state of science, etc., it would be a very difficult task. There is a LOT of information, and all of it is very advanced. To write it so that anyone with a normal level of intelligence but zero familiarity with the subject (a "dummy," in other words) can get reasonably up to speed on the topic would take a lot of skill, patience, and expertise on the subject matter. The difficulty, then, in writing a book called "Neurosurgery for Dummies," would be tenfold. Whereas in a descriptive book, the reader can get by with a sketchy retention of the subject matter, and skip parts that hold no interest, an instructive book requires that the reader/student follow the prerequisite material and retain it. With a programming language, there is no "Neurology," only "Neurosurgery." A descriptive book on Visual Basic would be near useless. So it's the much more difficult challenge or nothing at all. Sempf valiantly rises to meet the task, and for the most part, achieves the objectives. When I read this book, I got the sense that he really is aware of the difficulty of the material, as well as the perception a reader would have of it encountering it for the first time. (Compare this with my review for "VBA for Dummies," a book I despised, written by someone who has nearly no awareness of his reader.) There are varied and immense topics related to and/or required for a fully functional knowledge of Visual Basic programming: object-oriented programming, the Windows operating system and object model, Web technology and browser compatibility, different Visual Studio editions, comparisons to the other languages supported by Visual Studio, etc. It is simply impossible for a beginner-friendly, readable volume to penetrate all that breadth of information with complete depth. Visual Basic 2008 for Dummies is not meant to be a comprehensive tome. Sempf acknowledges this, and specifically points out in several sections of the book where he cannot expound further on a topic than the introduct

This book is designed to get you going quickly in Microsoft Visual Basic 2008. It's not a reference, it's probably not for the complete beginner, and true dummies probably won't be up to this level. Rather it is an entertaining tour for those with some modest programming experience on how to get going quickly in VB 2008. If you are a self-starter, this is the book for you! The author packs the book full of useful "how to's." Rather than trying to answer every question you could possibly ask about VB 2008, the author focuses on the most essential tools you will need. Once you get the basic idea of how a given tool or approach works from the book, you have what you need to apply these tools and/or approaches to other problems you encounter in VB 2008.