GLuce
Ive been learning on my own for about six months now. I bought 5 different for beginners type books and was disappointed in all of them. They all had the same flaw. Trying to cover way too much material to the point of shortchanging the proper amount of explanation of just about every aspect of the language. Also, without exception, they would give a single example for you to follow along with and then move on to the next topic. No reinforcement of what youve learned! I compare it to giving grade school kids a single example of long division on Monday, and expecting them to absorb algebra on Tuesday, followed by trig on Wednesday.
Then I found the holy grail of VB learning books.
Get yourself a copy of An introduction to learning Visual Basic. NET by David I. Schneider. I bought mine from Amazon, about $50. It was written to be a college textbook and is chock full of sample problems to reinforce what youve learned. How chock full? there are 11 chapters and each one has about 150 problems for the user to tackle. Further, half of them (the odd numbered ones) have their solution printed in the back of the book if case you get stuck. If you get this book, read it from start to end (actually, you can skip the first two chapters, they dont focus on the language per se.) and do all of the problems, I GUARANTEE youll be writing meaningful VB programs when youre through!
Regards,
Mick Dugan