Written by Sharon Podlin with Pamela Palmer
Published by Prima Publishing

One of my biggest complaints about most introductory books is that they provide very few good examples that are both easy to understand and comprehensive enough to be useful. Hands On Visual Basic 6 has helped solve this problem by providing substantial examples that do illustrate concepts in a way that even a beginner can understand.

I did a review of the VB 5.0 version of this book when it came out in 1998. Unlike other books that just revised their covers, this book does include new material to cover the new ADO Data Control and the new Data Report Designer. While the DRD is pretty limited, it can be a useful tool for beginners to get reports created quickly. The coverage of ADO is limited to the ADO Data Control; however, this is still a good addition. If you want to learn the ADO object model, you will want to supplement this book with another one.

As was mentioned earlier, the main focus of this book is to crreate three applications: a time tracking system, an invoice system, and a client management system. The book is broken into three parts, with each part building one of the applications while covering key concepts of VB. The first application covers the basic language structures of VB, using controls, message boxes/built-in functions, and some basic debugging techniques. This material is easy to read and covers all the bases thoroughly. It's also the same as the previous version of the book, since the changes in VB 6 were in the more advanced features.

The second part of the book covers the invoicing system. The application is built using MDI forms, menus, toolbars, some OLE automation, and making calls to DLLs. The application is also run through the Application Wizard and the Packaging and Deployment Wizard. The coverage of the Packaging and Deployment Wizard is new and is easy to understand. In case you're not aware of it, Microsoft finally put the Setup Wizard to sleep and replaced it with the PD Wizard. The PD Wizard is significantly more flexible and can handle all the different types of projects VB can build. For simple and even medium installations, the PD Wizard will handle all your needs and you won't have to resort to a third party tool like Wise or InstallShield.

The final part of the book creates a client management system that includes the use of a database. The chapter covers the use of the ADO Data Control, basic database design techniques (using Access 97), building reports, adding error handling, and compiling the final application. Database design can be a bit tricky to understand, but the coverage is enough to explain it to a beginner.

In closing, this book takes a unique approach to teaching VB while at the same time showing how to build realistic applications. The user will be able to take skills from both tasks to future projects.