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Have you ever watched kids play? |
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It's amazing how intense they can get. Fun is serious business when you're a kid. |
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It's also interesting that most child development specialists say that when kids are playing they're also learninga lot. |
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It seems we lose that somewhere along the way. Learning becomes homeworksomething we do, at first, because we want to get a good grade and, later, because we have to stay current if we want to stay relevant in this industry. Gradually, the fun is drained out of learning. Play is replaced by long, boring lectures and dry, lifeless textbooks. Who said that information must come in lecture format? Who said that technical books must be serious and dry? I reject that assumption! |
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And I reject the idea that learning must be hard work! |
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In a way, we programmers are lucky. Most of us sneak in some time to experiment with new technologies, even if we can't really justify the effort for a given project or bill a customer for the work. We'll spend hours trying to figure out how something works or find a cool new way to do something, even if we'll never use what we learned. We may call it "study" or "research" or "evaluation,'' but just between you and me, we know it's playing around. It's fun. And it's when we do some of our best learning. |
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So let's learn something. |
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How This Book Is Structured |
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The structure of this book is unlike any other book I've written. In fact, I can't recall seeing anything quite like it. It consists of three parts, each with a different purpose. What's more, it is specifically designed not to be read sequentially from cover to cover. |
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Each "chapter" in Part I consists of a short puzzle. The first puzzles (in Section 1 of the book) should prove only mildly frustrating even for beginning VB programmers who have limited experience with API programming. The puzzles increase in difficulty, and the puzzles toward the endin Sections 4 and 5should prove challenging even for experts. Although most of the puzzles consist |
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