Are all the recipes in Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook this detailed? Of course not! Most are a page to a page and a half long. A few are less than a page and some — like the one above — are more than two pages. One of the things that I like about this book is that it does not waste my time with more than what is needed to accomplish a job. For example, in the forms section, there is a recipe that is called "Centering a form." This is a trivial thing to do, unless of course you have never had to do it before. Sometimes, you are in a situation that you have done this before, and cannot quite remember the command to accomplish the task. A quick look and you have it.
There was once an old story about Peter Norton of Norton Antivirus fame that his son had a friend over to his house to play and his son’s friend asked what his dad did for a living and his son’s reply was “he looks things up." I will make no warrant to the truth of this story, but I will concur that in my life as a developer, I am constantly looking for better ways of accomplishing tasks as well as learning how to do new tasks well. To this end, I will always seek out references that will prove valuable. One of these will be Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook.
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