Amazon.com
Besides these basic container types, the author also proceeds farther afield into a demonstration of trees in VB, including balanced trees. (Though you won't need these data structures for most programs, it's interesting to see how they can be written in VB.)
More applicable to real-world problems are the sections on sorting, searching, and hashing in VB. (These algorithms can extend the range of the types of problems VB can solve.) This book closes with some network algorithms and some discussion of object-oriented techniques for VB, including some "patterns" or reusable designs for software. With the accompanying CD-ROM, you can use all the author's algorithms or write your own based on the techniques explored here. --Richard Dragan
Dr. Dobb's Journal
As a student of computer science, I had a fundamental principle drilled into my head time and time again -- languages come and go, but algorithms stand the test of time. A good algorithms reference doesn't need to focus on a particular language; however, those books tend to be crammed with computer-scientists' jargon, and provide less than an ideal starting point for the novice programmer. Rod Stevens' Ready-to-Run Visual Basic Algorithms, Second Edition is an attempt to bridge the gap, to help people who know the rudiments of programming in Visual Basic (VB) experiment with tried-and-tested algorithms and incorporate them into their own programs.
To make sense of this book, you must already be familiar with variables, conditional statements, loops, subroutines, and abstract data types. Even more advanced topics, such as class declarations and static variables, are introduced and used so quickly that a novice programmer will probably need an additional reference. In other words, Ready-to-Run Visual Basic Algorithms is a logical "next step" for someone who has completed an introduction to VB programming, but you should make sure that you've understood at least one other book about VB before attempting to read this one. I applaud this approach, because it lets you concentrate on learning algorithms without getting bogged down by syntactic details. -- Chris Jaekl, Dr. Dobb's Journal
