Visual Basic Programmer´s Guide
Microsoft Press There´s a huge selection of Visual Basic books on the market, and most of them
aren´t worth the paper they´re printed on. If you are already a programmer and you´re trying to learn Visual Basic, you should without question start with the Visual Basic Programmer´s Guide. You can buy a
printed copy for under £30, and it´s far better than almost every VB book I´ve ever bought. Hardcore Visual Basic
by Bruce McKinney
Microsoft Press This book is the exception to the famous rule of thumb that `90% of everything is rubbish´. It´s also a founder member of the rather small niche of truly
advanced Visual Basic books (in contrast to the host of books that merely claim
to be advanced). McKinney´s book, now in its second edition, is an authoritative, pragmatic and deeply technical treatment of fundamental Visual Basic programming topics written by a Microsoft insider. It also takes up the object-oriented programming cause, which alone ought to make the book required reading.
If you´re looking for how to make web pages or write SQL, look elsewhere: `the only book in the store with nothing about the Internet´, proclaims the cover, but it´s the absence of all that database rubbish that
really pegs this as a book for programmers. The rumour is that a third edition of Hardcore is planned, but that it won´t be written Bruce McKinney. Time will tell if anyone else can carry the
Hardcore torch as convincingly as Bruce. Developing ActiveX Components
with Visual Basic 5.0
by Dan Appleman
Ziff-Davis Press
Dan Appleman is another well-known Visual Basic hacker who is perhaps most famous for his Visual Basic Programmer´s Guide to the Windows API
(of which there are two versions, for the 16-bit and 32-bit APIs). However, whereas the API books are little more than Microsoft´s own documentation with annotations (and extra errors), Appleman´s ActiveX book is a penetrating and lucid exposition of the foundations of object-based programming in Visual Basic. My only criticism is that it uses a boring financial application as its main worked example.
Code Complete
A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
by Steve McConnell
Microsoft Press Steve McConnell´s seminal
book on the craft of programming is required reading for every software developer - if you don´t routinely apply the kinds of things he talks about in your day to day programming, you´re just not doing it right. To
project managers: there is a solid business case for buying each of your programmers a personal copy of this book and
giving them a couple of days off to read it. And don´t believe anybody who tells you this sort of thing `doesn´t apply to Visual Basic´ - programming is programming, and if your developers don´t know the fundamentals your project will crash and burn like so many before it.
Using CRC Cards
An Informal Approach to Object-Oriented Software Development
by Nancy M Wilkinson
SIGS Books In the decade
since they were invented, CRC Cards have become increasingly popular as a simple aid to analysis and design of object-oriented software. Use of the cards is simple, cheap and informal, and as a design method CRC Cards
bridge the gap between the ad-hoc and the crushingly technical methodologies expounded in the traditional OO literature. This book is a concise and practical description of the method, featuring the gritty specifics
that many such books leave out. The cards are also an effective `way in´ to the object-oriented way of thinking about programs, and one that will strike just the right note of informality with Visual Basic developers.
The only downside of this particular book (as far as Visual Basic developers are concerned) is that the final section carries the worked example through to implementation in C++.
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