Hardcore Visual Basic: Version 5.0

I learned BASIC as a child, and needed to upgrade to Visual Basic as a teen. I learned it from two sources: Learning Visual Basic in 21 Days, and this book, Hardcore Visual Basic. I learned some very simple things from the former, but the latter taught me what the compiler was actually doing and how the programs were structured. It's not a book for those that are beginners with computers, but for someone already familiar with computers, this book is invaluable. If you already understand Visual Basic (4, 5 or 6, but not .NET) and want to learn how to make it do something difficult, you are the target audience. I suspect I was unusual in using it as part of learning the language, but it worked. Either a good working knowledge of a computer or of Visual Basic are required to get much out of the book, but it works with either to work on the other. The reason the price is devalued is that Microsoft included the text in many versions of their MSDN documentation. Not all version include it, and those released over the last few years no longer contain it. I learned from the online copy, but have now picked up a hard copy as they are far nicer to read.

Definitely not for beginners. For a VB book, a lot of API stuff is well-covered. Also includes a very clear, if high-level, discussion of COM. The examples are well thought-out and executed. The real gems are the Windows type library and his VBCore and VisualCore DLLs. Win32 is essentially VB-unfriendly and Bruce McKinney has solved that problem for you. Just the time saved Declaring and cutting from win32api.txt cost-justifies this book. He's written a VB wrapper for almost everything that you would want to use. He even shows you in the sample code how to build your own vtables in VB. This book comes on the MSDN disk for VB6. Updates to the type library and his DLLs that work with VB6 can be found in his article. Buy it anyway and read it cover to cover. You'll be a better developer for it.

This is a textbook which should be studied and read in an orderly fashion. It's got all the info you need, but is not really a "how to" book. Great if you have the time and willpower to really learn the subject. Well worth the bucks.

Looks good. Haven't referred to it yet

good reference

This book will almost certainly be of no use to you unless you're a full time, fully fledged VB programmer. If you are, then there's a wealth of information in here about to do things VB was never designed to do. It describes how to do many things 'properly' but, in my experience, it's weak on how to do things simply. More often that is what is more important in the long run. This book will enable you to develop the fastest, most versatile VB applications ever but unless you're a concientious as well as a competent coder, no-one will ever be able to maintain you're code again.

If you really wanna take VB5/6 to the next level, you MUST acquire Bruce McKinney's classic Hardcore Visual Basic, probably the best VB book ever written. I know personally that Hardcore Visual Basic has been critical in the development of the tremendous Xyplorer file-manager, especially many of its very, very advanced programming techniques used to optimize the speed and efficiency to the absolute limits of the machine. (The developer Donald Lessau is so hardcore himself, that he used to hold frequent programming contests challenging developers to submit basic routines that outperformed his reference implementations, and then he'd publish the results down to the milliseconds of execution for each. And of course: share all the code for free.) This book would be 98% relevant to VB6 programmers as well. (But virtually useless to "Visual Basic .NET" which is an entirely different product, not sharing any ancestry with all prior versions of Visual Basic. Microsoft SHOULD have called VB.NET something else like "Basic for .NET Framework" so nobody would mistake it as "the next version of Visual Basic after 6.0" which it is not.) To this day (2018/10/28), some of my favorite (and even some still currently maintained, very actively developed software are written in VB5/6, like Xyplorer as I mentioned. VB5/6 are absolute compact, performance & efficiency BEASTS compared to the slug that is the Microsoft.NET Framework-encumbered "Visual Basic.NET". The runtime for VB6 (msvbm60.dll) is 1MB and included with almost all Windows OS by default. VB5/6 give the option of compiling to P-code or to Native code (which uses the LINK.EXE from Visual C++ and gives the option of generating .PDB Debug Symbols.) Whatever compiling options you choose, VB5/6 will produce an executable that performs with 90% less memory required (probably 95-98% less memory required, honestly, considering the 200-500MB minimums for most standard .NET Framework applications). The best part is, your user interface is capable of loading instantly and responding INSTANTLY to user input with no apparent delay whatsoever between when the user clicks a UI element, and when that element responds. For example, clicking File > Edit > Preferences will likely cause a Settings dialog to appear instantly, whereas a .NET Framework-based application will hesitate ~250ms-1.0s on a modern machine as it loads its hundreds of MB of behemoth runtime files into memory. This kind of delay may seem small, but these delays are what make the difference between users feeling your application is responsive and performing well, vs the frustration of feeling not entirely in control of your computer, leaving users to wonder "Did my click register? Is it loading? Do I need to click again? What's happening? Why was that so slow?"

Even though this book is out of print, I would like to review it. Better late than sorry. This is the best book about VB I have ever read, and a tremendously inspiring book about programming. Even though VB is not my preferred programing language, this book really gave me a kick and I started to appreciate VB in a way that I had never done before. Bruce McKinney does not only reveal all those sneaky details about VB that you whish you had known long before, but also teaches you a lot of useful stuff about the windows API, type libraries and COM. It is not a book for beginners, but should be read as soon as possible after passing the beginners level. Read it carefully from cover to cover, because it will reveal important details about windows and programming that you don't find in other books about advanced VB. Unfortunately, this book is about VB 5.0, which means that it has lost its relevance in the ever changing world of Microsoft Visual Basic. It's a shame that Bruce McKinney did not write a programming book about a more stable programming language. With his knowledge, passion and inspiring writing style I'm sure it would have been a classic book about programming.