By Steven Holzner
Welcome to your Visual Basic support package. That’s what this book has been designed to be: your complete VB support package. Have we reached that goal yet? It’s up to you to decide. If what you’re looking for is not in this edition, we’ll work hard to make sure it’s in the next—I encourage your suggestions. Please feel free to write. We’ll put in the time to make sure this book is the most complete one available on Visual Basic, edition after edition. This is the book we want you to come back to again and again.
I’ve used Visual Basic back before version 1 even came out publicly and have written many books on the program. I put Visual Basic to work for a very wide range of uses day after day; in fact, it’s is my favorite programming package of all, and it comes close to being my favorite program period. But I’ve never written a book on Visual Basic as complete as this one and never included as many features, documented or undocumented, examples, and tips in one volume.
This book has been designed to give you the coverage you just won’t find in any other book. Other books often omit not only the larger topics, like deploying your program after you’ve created it and creating Help files, but also the smaller ones, like covering in depth just about every control that comes with Visual Basic, including the ActiveX controls—from the MS chart control to flat scroll bars, from the serial port comm control to the Internet transfer control.
Reluctantly, I must admit that it’s impossible for one volume to be utterly comprehensive on the subject of Visual Basic (impossible because it’s not physically possible to bind a book that big yet), but we’re trying our best. It’s true that some specialty books might have more coverage on a few topics, but if you want to see more on a particular topic, write in and we’ll work seriously on adding more of that topic to the next edition.