I've bought a few of your "in a Nutshell" books. But I see that you've published VB & VBA in a Nutshell and are going to publish VB Controls in a Nutshell.

Those seem to me like bad choices. Why would I want to buy them when all of the information that I want is available from online help?

Hi Edith,

I think that your question is a good one. In fact, when we started thinking about doing Visual Basic books in the "in a Nutshell" series, it was the first question that we asked ourselves. More specifically, since we assumed that everyone would rely on online help as their primary resource, we wondered how we could create reference books that added value beyond that found in the documentation.

Actually, even assuming that the books offer more or less the same information that's available online, they're still valuable, particularly if you're using Visual Studio 6.0, where HTML Help has replaced WinHelp, and where the entire Visual Studio help system, rather than one tailored to Visual Basic, is available. Finding a relatively simple entry -- like information on the For...Next loop or the For Each...Next loop -- can be a time-consuming experience. That's not what you want from a help system; it should be efficient and unobtrusive, something that WinHelp was but HTML Help isn't.

But, in fact, our goal isn't to duplicate the documentation. Instead, it's to publish relatively inexpensive volumes that provide basic documentation and that offer material not readily or easily available in the documentation,

In VB & VBA in a Nutshell, we did this by adding a tips and techniques section to each language entry. The section discusses such things as errors in the documentation, unexpected behaviors, common and uncommon ways in which the language construct should be used, other language elements that can be used to better effect, etc. I've found that using the book is much faster than trying to use Visual Studio's HTML Help to find information about a particular language feature when I just want to look something up. But it's most useful when I'm having a programming problem, and I suspect that a particular VBA language feature is the culprit. By reading the tips and techniques section, I'm almost always able to identify and correct the problem.

Visual Basic Controls in a Nutshell solves a different set of problems. First, each control has its own gestalt, and making effective use of some of the newer and more complicated controls (like the ListView, TreeView, or MSChart controls) is frequently non-trivial. The first part of Visual Basic Controls in a Nutshell offers a step-by-step guide to using each of the major controls that appear when you select the "VB Enterprise Edition Controls" option when creating a new project using Visual Basic Enterprise Edition, and the "VB Professional Edition Controls" option when using Visual Basic Professional Edition.

There's a second set of problems that the book addresses, though. Visual Basic controls can be controlled programmatically through their properties, methods, and the events that they fire. There are, though, an enormous number of properties, methods, and events -- which means, of course, that some properties and methods are sure to get in the way of one another. This is expressed in two ways, both of which the first part of the book tries to document: a series of events fire in an order that may be significant to your application; and performing some action (such as assigning a property) causes some other action (such as a change to another property value or the firing of an event) that you may not expect.

--Ron

Return to: Ron's VB Forum