Book excerpt: Thoroughly revised for the latest version of Visual Basic, this book explains basic concepts in a clear and explicit way that takes very seriously one thing for granted-that the reader knows nothing about computer programming. Addressed to anyone who has no prior programming knowledge or experience, but a desire to learn programming with Visual Basic, it teaches the first thing that every novice programmer needs to learn, which is Algorithmic Thinking. Algorithmic Thinking involves more than just learning code. It is a problem-solving process that involves learning how to code. This edition contains all the popular features of the previous edition and adds a significant number of exercises, as well as extensive revisions and updates. Apart from Visual Basic's arrays, it now also covers dictionaries, while a brand new section provides an effective introduction to the next field that a programmer needs to work with, which is Object Oriented Programming (OOP). This book has a class course structure with questions and exercises at the end of each chapter so you can test what you have learned right away and improve your comprehension. With 250 solved and 450 unsolved exercises, 475 true/false, about 150 multiple choice, and 200 review questions and crosswords (the solutions and the answers to which can be found on the Internet), this book is ideal for novices or average programmers, for self-study high school students first-year college or university students teachers professors anyone who wants to start learning or teaching computer programming using the proper conventions and techniques