The strongest features of this text are its digestible introductory material and simple "lab exercises," centering on the major tools for creating distributed applications the Microsoft way. These examples include Visual Basic 6, including its modeling tools, as well as SQL Server 7 and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). Short, comprehensible exercises are the rule here, and there is plenty of advice on installing and running these tools. Later chapters concentrate on server-side processing with material on MTS, stored procedures, and security. There's also plenty of hands-on detail, with numerous screenshots for properly installing and administering your distributed solutions.

Because of its relative ease of presentation, readers may doubt that this book is all you need to master VB 6 certification. (It's certainly true that other exam guides seem to stress the gotchas on test questions.) Obviously, this Microsoft-sponsored book doesn't adopt a "beat the testmaker" approach; it instead stresses the basic skills and knowledge that its certification exam will test. There's little doubt that having this Microsoft textbook in your test preparation arsenal will raise your chances of getting certified with today's Visual Basic. --Richard Dragan