I have a stack of Visual Basic books to wade through, and I chose this one because, well, I love Wally Wang. We go way back, back to obscure computer magazines and that one night in Vegas when we found $600 (plus an unknown amount of a certain South American currency) in our hotel room. But that's a story for another day.

I love the way Wally (known as Wallace on the cover because "Wally Wang" just doesn't translate well in England) writes. He can certainly make a dull subject bright. There is no denying his humor in the figures and throughout the text and examples.

The book is massively entertaining. But the question is, does it teach Visual Basic well? And therein lies the rub, not only in this but also with all Visual Basic books. Unlike traditional programming languages, Visual Basic is both a language and a product. So, the question is, which do you talk about first, creating a Visual Basic program or using the Visual Basic interface? Wally opts for the interface first, which he handles well. Alas, my goal in learning any new programming language is to write the first program. In this book, that doesn't happen until chapter 4. Ouch.

Happily, though, once the book gets going, there's no stopping it--it is packed. The pace is swift, and the steps outlining each project are thick. This may be too much for some beginners, but it sated my appetite for relearning this programming language. (My first books were on GW Basic way back in the mid-1800s.)

The book's hefty cover price means it has a CD-ROM, which I didn't look at. But even without looking at it, I enjoyed reading Wally's text--something I haven't done in too long a time. --Dan Gookin