Advanced Visual Basic 6.0 
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Author The Mandelbrot Set
Publisher Microsoft Press
Length 896 pages
vbRad Rating: 2 fingers up. (2 out of 5)
Reviewed by Kohinoor Basu

This book, as the name suggests, is directed towards relatively advanced Visual Basic developers and needless to say has been written by people who are experts in there respective fields. After reading the book, which is pretty thick and heavy and verbose, my impression is that the book could have been made lot thinner. The book often rambles aimlessly to a point where one is forced to flip pages. The publishers could have saved some trees by using less paper in printing the book.

It contains too much text and very little useful code. Some examples regarding the use of variants are just outright ridiculous. Even novice programmers would stay away from such practices. The chapter on Windows CE starts with great promise of guiding readers to the new and exotic realm of embedded systems, but ends with a whimper. Discussion on this subject matter is too rudimentary to be of any use. The discussions are certainly not as advanced as the name of the book suggests. Some topics such as web classes are quite outdated. It seems that the editors of the book have not spent enough time to remove old concepts, which may have been relevant in the previous edition, but are quite obsolete now. Some chapters were simply out of scope (How to Find, Recruit, and Retain great programmers). I just cannot understand how this chapter is anyway related to Advanced Visual Basic.

However all is not lost. Some chapters did present some good concept, though lacking solid implementation details. As an advanced developer I can accept that as long as the concepts are well explained. The author did a good job of discussing some advanced error handling techniques which Visual Basic has lacked direct 'easy' support for from day one. Some chapters went into the innards of Visual Basic's compiler options, which I did find very useful.

To sum up, the book could have been lot thinner with less talk and more code. This book will not be very useful for budding Visual Basic geeks. I suggest they go elsewhere for enlightenment. As for the experienced users, there are some chapters, which can be of some use, but they will have to fish them out from 900 odd pages.




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