by Dr.Liew

Created on: April 09, 2008   Last Updated: July 27, 2011

I have been learning VB programming for the past 30 years and I would like to share with you how and where do I learn VB. Before I begin, let me tell you that the most important criteria to learn VB, and for that matter learning anything, is that you must have deep passion for it, and you must have perseverance to pull you though the difficult times in your learning curve. Besides, you should have some basic background in mathematics so that you can understand the programming logics better.

Learning VB has never been so easy as of today, because learning resources are readily available with the advent of the world wide web. Back in the 1970s, basically the only learning resources are books and magazines. In the 1980s, you have additional learning channel in the form of CD ROM. Then you could learn VB online in the 1990s till now.

You might want to ask whether do we need to attend VB programming class before we can program in VB, I would say the answer is yes and no. The reason I say "yes" is that if you wish to make VB programming your career, then you better attend formal VB programming course so that you can learn the language systemically and able to obtain a certificate at the end of the course. The certificate could be useful when you apply for a programming job. However, if you just like to learn VB as a hobby, like myself, you do not really have to attend a formal VB class. You can indeed grab a VB book such as "Visual Basic 6 -How to program" (Deitel, Deitel & Nietel,1999) to start learning VB.

I started learning VB when I was studying in University back in 1970s, when VB was not even called VB, it was called BASIC which means Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Those days we don't even have PC or laptops, what we do was to use the punch-card machine to type the codes one card at a time so the whole program might consists of hundreds of cards. After that we will send the cards to the computer center to be processed and collect the output the next day! And we have no chance whatsoever to see or touch the computer, it must be the giant main frame that was produced by the big blue, IBM Inc. The programming speed was like snail crawl as compare to today's PCs or notebooks, where you get your results instantly.

There were many versions of BASIC available at that time. Different software companies produced different version of BASIC, such as Microsoft QBASIC, QUICKBASIC, GWBASIC, IBM BASICA and so on. I was using GWBASIC at the beginning

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