Written by Peter Wright
Published by Wrox Press

Visual Basic 6 includes new and enhanced object-oriented programming features, many of which can make programmers' jobs easier. However, object-oriented programming has quite a bit of theory attached to it and most of the books on the market are too academic to be helpful. Peter Wright's Beginning Visual Basic 6 Objects provides an introduction to object-oriented programming without being too obtuse.

Instead of spending a lot of time in theory, the book jumps right into development and creates a class to demonstrate how to use properties and events. There isn't a lot of detail, so this quick introduction may be confusing to some people. I'd advise you to skip the first chapter and start at chapter 2, which covers a bit more theory and explanation of why object-oriented programming is better. Some of the examples provided don't really prove the author's point, such as how object-oriented programming eliminates "spaghetti code", which is not necessarily the case. OO programming can actually cause significantly worse coding unless steps are taken to prevent it.

Chapter 3 gets into the design techniques in creating objects and their interfaces. The text is easy to follow and provides quite a bit of information for new developers. He also ties the object in with both the database and the user interface. This is key information since objects without permanent storage are fairly useless for developers. While the particular technique he used is not one that I would recommend, it serves the purpose well.

Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapter and shows how to build object models and objects that are made of other objects, which is also critical information. The next few chapters then get into building ActiveX components (also known as ActiveX DLLs) and controls. It would seem to me that covering controls with the OO content makes sense, but not necessarily in the same place. There's a lot of other material about object-oriented programming that could have been included instead.

The last three chapters in the book go deeper into OO design and development. They cover the Use Case model, which is a fairly easy model to understand and is also used in the industry. The author does a good job of covering the methods of enforcing business rules, as well as dealing with physical storage issues.

In short, the book will provide a fairly good introduction to object-oriented programming. However, there are many things left out of this book that new programmers will run into in their programming. I would suggest using this book in combination with a more advanced book if you're looking to really learn OO development.