This book's theme is random numbers. To be more precise, the subject is pseudorandom numbers, because they are repeatable and therefore not truly and completely random.
However, the new algorithm presented here does create a unique and never repeated sequence for each and every possible string used as a seed, and each of those sequences effectively has an infinite cycle length.
This "Programming by Example" series of books on Visual Basic programming is a little different than most every book out there. Rather than being language-centric, these books are more topic-centric. That is, instead of just rehashing how to program with the latest and greatest version of Visual Basic, these books provide real-world code examples that are useful in themselves. These programs help make it easy to learn tricks and techniques of the Visual Basic programming language. Presenting new programming concepts in a relevant and experimentally-based context greatly aids in understanding and minimizing the learning curve. This book presents some "what to do" examples of Visual Basic programming, with a light touch on "how to do it". If you hit any snags along the way with the "how" part, there are a ton of resources on the Internet (I like searching with Google), and in many cases a press of the F1 key while in the environment will pop up a lot of reference information directly from Microsoft.
The absolute best way to really soak up programming concepts is to actually work with them. Therefore, throughout this book you'll find "Fun Challenges." The intent is to encourage the reader to have some fun experimenting, by going beyond the program just presented. Some of the challenges are easy, some are very challenging, but hopefully all are fun. Feel free to give them a try, and to invent your own challenges too. You'll likely learn and retain more by doing so. There's a perfect metaphor for this learning technique, when it comes to learning how to ride a bicycle. You can go to classes, watch videos, listen to lectures, study the theory and physics involved, and on and on, but until you actually get on a bicycle and ride, your brain won't completely get it. Same with programming!
John Clark Craig is a passionate programmer from way back. Although he's learned several other programming languages such as FORTRAN, C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, and micro controller assembly, his heart has always been with the BASIC language. John has written almost two dozen books on a variety of programming topics, published by Microsoft Press, O'Reilly Media, and others. If you really want one of those bigger, more expensive books, check out Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook by O'Reilly Media (also available on Kindle). The code snippets in that book are still valid and very useful, mostly because the language has been very stable since the switch to the .NET Framework in February of 2002.
