We have almost gone through a series of 30 articles. We have been dabbling with various aspect of programming, specially with Visual Basic. And undoubtedly, there must have been times, you must have been stuck at a particular point with no solution in sight. You have a lot of information at hand. Its not the case of information shortage, but a case of plethora of information. If you have the professional edition on CD, there are hundreds of pages of printed documentation, megabytes of help files, Visual Basic Books Online, the MSDN Visual Basic Starter Kit, and a variety of other miscellaneous files to wade through. Plus there are the Web resources, articles, books, manuals, etc. So where do you look for what you want?
Help Files
Nearly everything you need to know about writing Visual Basic applications can be found in the help files. Every statement, function, property, method and event is fully documented. However, that doesn't really help you very much if you don't know what the keyword is that you need to find to accomplish your objective.However, one of the benefits that you have as a student of programming is that you're likely to already be a Windows "power user." As such, you're probably well versed in searching help files for the information you need. The VB help files are well indexed and with VB6 offer the capability of full-text searching. In most cases, if you can't find what you're looking for in the contents or the index, you can find it with a full-text search.
One of the other great things about any decent development platform is the degree to which the help files are integrated into the code editor. Visual Basic is no exception. If you get stumped by a keyword in your code or need the syntax for using it, click on the word in the code window and press F1 to display the relevant help topic.
Just in case you haven't already discovered or guessed it, you should be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time studying the material in the online help and browsing through jumps to related topics.
As far as referring to a book is concerned, I am a bit skeptical about it. And there are valid reasons. Firstly, there are a hell number of books out there. Secondly, they are not skinny manuals but voluminous mass of text. So the best option would be the help files or Google.com.
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