Critiquing Sam's Teach Yourself Visual BASIC in 24 Hours
Given that time has become the most precious resource anyone has today, it's no surprise that publishers including Sam's Technical Publishing should introduce an entire series of titles that promise to teach some of the most complex programming skills in a short 24 hours. This is of course assuming a total of 24 hours invested over many days; it does not imply that in a straight 24 hour timeframe all the content provided in a 400+ page book can be absorbed. This is just isn't possible given how people learn which is by repetition and continued practice. Even for the most advanced students who are ready for tackling this book would take at least a week worth of accumulated time testing, verifying, and learning the concepts of the book. When the publishers state learning the subject in 24 hours, they are only speaking of time-on-task, not the ability to comprehend and use the insights gained. If this sounds like the publishers are over-committing and under-delivering, they are. It may take an accumulated time of 24 hours to read the book, yet comprehending and applying the complex concepts of this book will take at a minimum days for the most advanced students, to weeks for those just learning a programming language.
The books' structure however is aimed at offering portions of content to each audience its aimed at, from the beginner to the intermediate and finally the advanced. In a sense the title only needs to change to make the book more accurate, yet the series "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" has alluring and broad market potential. The book's most major flaws: Striving to be all things to all people Taking all the points made in the previous section on the perfect storm for learning into account, it is obvious the author wanted to write an all-encompassing book for Visual Basic, not wanting to segment out beginning, intermediate, and advanced topics. As many computer applications and systems were not specifically designed to communicate and share data with one another, there's been an urgent need on the part of organizations of all types to share data across all applications that comprise their information systems strategies. Instead, in the beginning of Section II the reader is introduced to the types of databases Visual Basic supports, how to declare variables, how to assign data to variables, and why datatype mix-ups can occur over time. Reverses direction and goes away from a point-and-click programming model to coding in Part II: Coding the Essentials. This is a very critical point, and is also underscored by the concerns regarding compatibility of Visual Basic versions even distributed with the book with these advanced features. This is another example of how this book which promises to teach these advanced topics in 24 hours can easily fall short due to the extensive prerequisites on the one hand, and the "perfect storm" that needs to come together for a reader to attain the stated performance levels. This underscore another weakness of the book's structure, which is the additive nature of the information isn't timed to give the student a chance to practice and absorb the information. These are all programming concepts typically taught in both fundamentals courses, and in the case of Do Loops, Fortran programming courses. XML's flexibility in handling multiple types of data is a second factor in its growing use to integrate systems together. This book in particular is relatively weak in this regard, with not a single chapter dedicated to testing and debugging applications. In striving for the economics of the market for publishers, the book sets a very high expectation for the reader of learning all these concepts quickly, in 24 hours. The bottom line is that this assumption is riddled with logical errors; what if the reader never gets the guidance to install the application right in the first place? Hours upon hours of work could be lost from working with an incompatible version of Visual Basic.
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