Excerpts from the Introduction:

Visual Basic Essentials is intended to be of use to both novices looking to learn Visual Basic, and to those proficient in other languages who plan to cross-train. The Visual Basic language, combined with the Visual Studio, provides a uniquely powerful, yet easy to learn development environment allowing even the absolute beginner to rapidly create and deploy Windows applications.

Visual Basic Essentials begins with instruction on designing Windows forms in Visual Studio including tasks such as designing menu systems and toolbars and wiring up event procedures. The book then introduces the basic concepts of the Visual Basic language covering concepts such as Visual Basic variable types, looping, flow control, functions and subroutines. Once the basics are covered, topics such as single and mutli-dimensional arrays, string handling. File I/O and date and time manipulation are explained. Finally, more advanced topics such as Visual Basic object oriented programming, database access and graphics drawing are detailed.

Throughout the book, liberal use is made of code excerpts providing practical examples of theory in action. It is intended that having read this online book, the programmer will be confidently developing Windows applications using Visual Basic and Visual Studio.