how did you learn VB??

[new fish]

Hi
My tuition in vb was a module as part of a mechanical engineering degree,
it was limited to creating programes to help in automated calculations (nothing you couldnt achieve in MsExcel)
i was really impressed with the flexibility and possibilites it offered
and went about "teaching" myself more of it. thru a beginners book and
plenty of help here of course!! (thanks)

i've recently had a thought which may turn into a project.
hook up a machine to my computer and control it using a vb program which accepts instruction over the internet.
my early investigations point twards "winsock" as the tool to achieve communications over the net.

and this got me wondering:
how does one go about learning how to exploit winsock, or any other
aspect of vb or any other language!
obviously there are excellent resources on the www, such as this one.
and many code examples.
is this how most people learn?
or for eg, is there a "manual" on how to use winsock with vb.
is msdn where its at when you want to learn?

i'm not asking for any specific help with winsock btw!
just wondering where/how you guys learned the art!
thanks
jim

[si_the_geek]

You are on the right track already - that is how most people learn.

In terms of a manual, check out the MSDN Library (aka the VB help files). If you have a piece of code you want more info about simply click on the code and press F1; For more general info open up the help and go to the "Search" tab (preferably tick the "Titles Only" box) and enter your keyword (in this case "Winsock").

[DeanMc]

I Second MSDN, also intellisense which tends to tell you what certain things do. A good reference is always handy, I suggest Pro VB2008 and the 3.5 framework by apress if you are learning VB.net. These forums of course are invaluable and the most important, playing with code. You could read for years and not know half the amount fooling around with code would teach you!

[techgnome]

I was handed the install disks for Vb3, a computer, and was told, "have at it" ... fortunately I had prior programing experience (although not with VB ... or Visual anything for that matter.... only Pascal, C, Ada, COBOL and ASM...) Took me about 7 days to figure out the concpet behind event program (I spent three days going where the heck is the IF statement that says "If button Clicked, call this...." it was the hardest lession I've ever had in programming - turns out that FM was the answer).

Also in my favor, that's how I happen to learn best... since then, I've kept up by readin articles, playing with the language, not being content with what I have, always looking for the next advancement, how to leverage what I know into something new, etc.

-tg

[abhijit]

I remember reading a book - Black Book series. That's how I started.


My previous programming knowledge was limited to writing DOS batch files and C programs that could be executed at the command prompt.

[chris128]

I wouldn't say I have "learnt" VB as there is sooo much to learn but I'd like to think I'm just past the stage of being a beginner now so here's how I learnt what I know so far:
Both of my parents were programmers, using languages such as Cobal and C++ and so obviously I took a bit of an interest in what they did as I was growing up. When I was about 11 or 12 I borrowed a C++ book from my dad and made a few very basic command line applications that just did simple addition and multiplication etc. Eventually I got bored of that and at that age couldn't really grasp the more complicated concepts so I gave up. When I left school I got a job as an IT Professional (aka Desktop/Network/Server Admin) and soon found that writing batch files and vbscript files often made my job easier.

Anyway, you didnt ask for my life story did you! So I'll get to the point... Eventually I moved on to trying to learn VB.NET and got a book named something like "Getting started with VB 2005" ... but I cant say I have ever read more than about 20 pages of it. I always ended up getting carried away playing around with things that I was trying to make and just ignoring the book :P I ended up finding that the internet was a hell of a lot more informative and of course found these forums where I have learnt a lot.
To be honest, I find the best way of learning for me is to just try and help people out on here. Often people will be trying to do something that I would never of needed to do previously (like parse XML documents for example) but then once I have learnt how to do it and helped them then I know how to do it when I need to do something similar in the future in one of my apps.

So to sum up...How did I learn VB? Google.com + vbforums.com

[DeanMc]

... and constant MSN harassment lol!

[chris128]

who moi!?? Never

[JuggaloBrotha]

I got started on Basic, then went to QBasic, then vb4, then vb6 then vb 7.1 (vs 2003), then vb8 (vs 2005) and now I'm halfway switched to vb9 and I'm looking forward to vb10 next year.

I started all this when I was 13, I'm 24 now.

[Pino]

I was allways interested in programming games as a child I was strange in the sense I used to play alot of games but allways thought about how and why things happened in them. I eventually picked up a Java Game Programming Book, messed around with the concepts but never progressed.

A few months after that somone passed me a copy of vb5 and a book Project 1 = Slot Machine and after that I pretty much dropped the book and went to a forum online (Sadly not this one) and I set myself projects and just did them using online sources to assist me!

The rest is history I suppose.

[Hack]

I was handed the install disks for Vb3, a computer, and was told, "have at it" ...

Me too...at the time, I couldn't even speall "Vizual Basic"

That was in 1997 or 1998 and I've been with VB (and other things) ever since.

[techgnome]

Me too...at the time, I couldn't even speall "Vizual Basic"

That was in 1997 or 1998 and I've been with VB (and other things) ever since.

hehehe.... it was '95 for me... It was "standard" training for the office where I'd been assigned... the Air Force standard was Ada... but because of the unit, we got a waiver.... but training wasn't included as part of that. So I got to take all that Ada training, toss it out the window and learn how to do "drag and drop" programming.
I too have been a VBer ever since.

-tg
as a side note - to anyone who has ever used Ada... there is a .NET version... it's called A# ... seriously.

[modpluz]

well...i had no previous programming experience prior to learning Visual Basic(approx. 7 yrs ago), from what i remember, i wanted to learn ASP to develop a web app and couldn't get through.

So i picked up VB after months of trying to master ASP(interestingly enough, i didn't have to dig further into ASP because they're somewhat identical).

but most of what i know now(ASP, VB, PHP, Perl...e.t.c), i learnt on my own and of course i wouldn't have known most of these things if it wasn't for VBF.

Big Ups VBF!!!

[Davadvice]

was at college and we used Pascal, Delphi ,Java C++. picked up VB at work and just really trail and error using help files in access at the start and then on here.