The goals of this book: Cover programming topics as well as Visual Basic. Traditional textbooks do a pretty good job of teaching the basics of a given programming language, but they often do not cover relevant programming topics that are incidental to the language. For example, books will omit sections on programming style, common pitfalls, debugging, good/bad programming practices, and testing. Consequently, by the time you finish the book, you may understand how to program in a language, but you might also have picked up bad habits that will come back to bite you later!