Recommend a beginner's book for Visual Basic

[Doug Fuller]

Indeed - it's a natural consequence of the growth explosion 
in hardware resources:

Back in the day when you only had 64kb of memory, you had to 
write memory-efficient code.  Back in the day when you had 
circuits running in the sub-megahertz range, you had to 
develop fast algorithms.  This is why Y2K happened - 
programmers sacrificed century datespace for other purposes.

But THESE days, processors are fast, and memory is cheap - 
bloat and inefficiency are running wild.  I'm still trying to 
understand why a mail reader requires an HTML interface, for 
example...

>   I agree with the ideal of writing clean code, but I
>   think those of us who still believe in it are
>   quickly becoming dinosaurs. To people coming up, "it
>   just doesn't matter."
>
>   Leisha
>
>   Doug Fuller wrote:
>
> I've always found C an easier language to learn (I didn't
> really grok VB until after I'd taken enough C++ and Java to
> translate).
>
> So, I'm gonna recommend
> http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ .  Of course, the
> memory management is unnecessary (your student shouldn't be
> looking at "Advanced Concepts", as they don't exist in VB),
> and all the syntax will be different.  But, hey, that's part
> of what learning programming is about... learning that the
> syntax doesn't really matter.  What matters is what you want
> to do, and how difficult it's going to be.
>    
>
> As someone coming from a C/C++/Java background, I can't 
stand
> VB.  Why does Microsoft have to reinvent the wheel (i.e.
> standard library functions) in everything they do?  Things
> like substring functions.  In almost every computer 
language,
> it's called substr().  I spent an hour digging through the
> worthless help pages finding that it's called Mid$() in VB.
>
> Now, having said that, I do want to briefly address that 
last
> quoted paragraph - syntax does matter, insomuch as it
> contributes to readability/maintenance.  In the spirit of
> collaboration and/or modification, knowing how to write 
clear
> code and document it well will save time and effort in the
> future if you or a collaborator decide to tweak parameters.
>  
-- 
Doug Fuller
dfuller at wayne.edu
Research Assistant, Wayne State University
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences