You might have heard that Wrox has run into a "spot of trouble" and has closed their doors. Sad but true! But ...

First, They're Coming Back! Already their web page is back. (It's under new management, and not as complete as before, but it's back.)

Second, You can probably still find this great book on bookshelves.

Anyway ...

Since the first day, VB 6 has been The People's Choice in the About Visual Basic poll and has pretty much swamped VB.NET. So we have the Spotlight on VB 6 this week.

Evidently, the Wrox Writing Machine heard you too because they have a brand new book out for 2003 just for VB 6.

  Take That, corporate Microsoft marketing droids!

Bottom line: A bargain and a buy! The "main" book is worth buying all by itself. But the fact that the CD has five MORE books in full PDF image format - and they're ALL great books - makes this a whole library under one cover.

This is no "language reference" book. There are scads of those for VB 6 already and the Help that comes with VB does the job anyway. This is a "resource" book for VB 6 that is focused on the fact that most professional programmers will continue to depend on VB 6 to get the job done even in a world that is starting to become really .NET focused. But all of the material included on the CD are what makes this an amazing resource, as we shall see. In fact, the included CD probably has more actual value than the "paper" part of the book. I'm guessing that Wrox published it this way to appeal to all of the buyers who still want something that has some weight in their hands when they spend over fifty bucks on a book.

The subjects in the "paper" book are selected specifically to help the VB 6 programmer take advantage of the new stuff happening in computing while the CD thoroughly covers the established technology developed over the long run that VB 6 has had. For example, "design patterns" are a particularly OOP kind of topic, and chapter 2 shows examples in a VB 6 context. The "Repository" design pattern shows how to maintain "state" (as in an ASP application distributed over a server farm) WITHOUT using the unreliable ASP 3.0 "session variables."