If you just press the menu items you will see the shortcut required for that item. You can setup the keyboard for VB6 layout, C#, Web and general development. Likely you are using a different setup to the one your book describes! To add, when you use a chord (which is the name of a two stage shortcut), you can see at the bottom status car something like

(Ctrl + K) was pressed. Waiting for second key of chord ....