Right I can program in Visual Basic 2005/8 but I need to learn some more to understand the language better so that I can break away from the books -what I mean is just going through them and using a bulk of their code - and start just using my own mind - of course I'll still use the books as reference. But whilst using this book "Visual Basic 2005 design and development" the expert one-to-one, one. I need to know the best way of how to use it. When going through other books which I have used, what the book does is it gives you either a couple of projects or just one but what they both do is adventually take you through the book doing one of the projects and concentrating on one of them and you use and learn all the skills whilst developing this project. Now unfortunately this book doesn't seem to do this. Rod talks about subjects as a whole and doesn't give you the theoretical project to concentrat on. And because I'm being shown how to use all these skills and not putting them into anything practical, I don't feel like I'm achieving the absorption of these skills into my memory. In other words I don't fell like I'm learning what Rod is saying because I'm just reading and not using them practically. Now what i have been doing with the reference 2005 vs programer to programer book was go through what I could using the Visual Basic programming suite but this got boring, even though I absolutely love to program!

I suppose what I'm asking here is how did other people use the book? Would just reading it but reading it properly, so giving it a lot of throught not just reading it to read, give me the skill that I need and would I remember these skills? Has anyone else used the book and what is being said in the book, in pratical tasks even though these "tasks" might have been theoretical tasks?

This help would be most needed. But, if all you're going to write is "think of a practical task whilst reading the book so that you can combine the two", or something along them lines, then please don't comment, but thianks all the same.