For complete beginners, besides the Dummies books, I would recommend the VB book by Diane Zak. This is a textbook, but it has step by step tutorials so that you can't make a mistake.

The books by Wrox are generally very good, especially "Beginning VB6 Database Programming" by John Connell.

I have found books by both SAMS and Microsoft Press to be hit or miss in quality. Some are very good; some stink.

The best way to get opinions of books by readers is to go on Amazon.com and look at the reader reviews (a reader can rate a book from 1 to 5 stars). Go there and do a search on Visual Basic and check it out.