This book intends to show the reader how to implement the 23 patterns discussed in the GOF Design Patterns book using VB6 or VB.Net, which it refers to as VB7.

This book is well thought out, making use of the GOF patterns and showing how to implement examples in both versions of Visual Basic. I have used earlier versions of VB in previous jobs for my employer, so I was interested to see how they compare with the latest incarnations.

The introductory section introduces the idea of design patterns with a short history and some references and then briefly covers UML diagrams. There is not enough detail here for some, but I found the section quite useful.

The remainder of the book looks at each design pattern in turn, describes particular applications of the pattern and then provides an implementation in VB. The code examples are enhanced by well laid-out commentary, with the addition of UML or other forms of diagram where this is appropriate to clarify the points being made.

On the whole I found this book to be well written and easily readable; providing enough information to get started in using the GOF patterns. Its intended readership is clearly the VB programmer, so it may not be useful to those using other languages, hence my reservations. Even so, because VB is fairly easy to read it might be useful to more than its intended target audience.

I was not able to run the examples on the CD-ROM as I do not currently have VB6 or VB.NET installed on my machine.

Recommended with reservations.