While at uni in the late 90’s I wrote “applications” in MS Access and VBA, eventually transitioning to SQL Server and VB6, followed by .NET in the early 2000’s.

I had more time for reading back then, and even though I’ve thrown out my treasured collection of Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal magazines, I fondly remember a couple of great books that helped me level up my software development skills. I wouldn’t recommend reading them now (I will suggest some relevant, somewhat ageless, books in part 2), but here’s what I recall about a couple of fantastic 90’s/00’s books, in no particular order:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server by William R. Vaughn: This book is from 1997 and so is probably more a history lesson than technical guide now. I remember it as funny and insightful, and perfect for covering little gotchas in the days before complete Stack Overflow answers. The style is personable too which helps readability, especially back when I read books linearly, cover to cover. The author, William R. Vaughn, went on to write fantasy novels, see https://betav.com/.

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns by Jimmy Nilsson: I got a lot out of this book in 2006 because it helped me take a step back and think about business problems, using the language of the business. The book introduced me to aspect-oriented programming and was a great follow on from Jimmy’s first book (which I also owned) .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000. I think I still use an adapted version of the book’s SQL Server stored procedure error handling too. The author’s website is at http://jimmynilsson.com/blog/.

Advanced Microsoft Visual Basic by The Mandelbrot Set International: Another old book (1998) that contained gold for me around error handling and debugging. I last fired up Visual Studio 6, running in a sandbox, in mid-2016 - but do not miss it at all. The book was written by a collection of authors on what would now be called “best practices”.

Dan Appleman’s Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide to the Win32 API by Dan Appleman: A detailed technical reference published in 1999, that was incredibly useful at the time. As far as I’m aware Dan’s coverage of the Win32 API has never been beaten. I seem to recall Dan was one of the high profile authors writing about Windows development, that argued .NET was a step backwards from VB6 (see also: Karl E. Peterson). I don’t miss “DLL hell”, 3 tier architecture, COM, threading, pointer allocations etc.

Other books I remember (and might still own) but didn’t make the list:

• MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-306): Developing and Implementing Windows-Based Applications with Visual Basic.NET and Visual Studio.NET by Mike Gunderloy: Mike still going strong, blogging at https://afreshcup.com/
• Visual Basic Applications for Office 2000 Unleashed: how to do some tricky stuff in MS Access
• Wrox books: some of those all-red covered books were fantastic
• SQL for Dummies: got me through my first database subject at uni