I had never ever seen anything so beautiful, so elegant, and yet, so simple...! I simply fell in love with VB the minute I set my eyes on her!! I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her!
OK...OK...maybe that is carrying things a little too far. But that is how exactly it was between Visual Basic and me. Then, VB was in version 5 (now it is in version 7--also called VB.net!). My friend was learning it, and he was showing it off to me. For me, who was then struggling with the #define’s, the system.out.println’s, the clrscr()’s of various languages (for those of you who think the three words I mentioned above are in Greek...you are pretty close! ;-)), this language looked real cooool!! You could click and drag text boxes on to a form, place buttons on the form, rattle on the keyboard to write a few lines of pretty sensible looking code, and presto!, the form could be displayed, stuff entered into the text boxes, and the buttons pressed for something to take place!! It felt good. You were able to take charge of your computer, and have it do whatever you wished (well, almost!), without having to tell it what to do in a far-fetched language. For example, to display a message to the user, you needed to simply type
MsgBox (’’I love VB’’)
That’s it!! Wouldnt even be difficult to remember MsgBox, would it now??
If you are a beginner and keen on learning programming, just as a hobby, I would recommend that you get yourself a book on Visual Basic (again, I would recommend version 6.0; version 7 is a different kettle of fish altogether!!!), and get going. Once you have Visual Basic installed, and that book with you, you can be on your way!! Programming was never ever so much fun...!! Trust me!!
Within the first few days of learning VB, I had created a full-fledged ’Snakes and Ladders’ game. It was fun. From there on, I created several games, and enjoyed myself too. I also taught VB to students, and got them hooked on to it in as huge a way as I was!! They were all churning out games--SCRABBLE, and a CRICKET game, MONOPOLY etc. It was fun!!
Well, with VB, it’s not just games you can create...although that is what I love to use it for!! You could create the kinds of applications that are used in banks, reservation counters etc. Infact, the kinds of applications that you can create with Visual Basic depends on your creativity, and ofcourse your knowledge of VB.
If you are planning on getting VB 6.0 installed on your system, I would also recommend on getting the MSDN also installed. This provides you online help, which is an exhaustive resource, right from the makers of VB themselves!
All said, VB does not give the powerful features that languages like C can...but then, try creating a button in C as fast as you can as in VB. Each language has its own limitations, and VB has its own too. But once you are hooked on it like I am, you will forgive it its limitations, and delve more into its strengths.
Happy Programming....!! Try it!