The first section of this book introduces the concepts of object-oriented programming in general, and in VB in particular. We cover how you draw UML diagrams to represent these programs and their objects and show how to build your own controls using VB6. We introduce inheritance and interfaces and then take you through the fundamentals of programming in VB.NET. Then we show you how you can simplify programming using these techniques in this powerful new language.

Once you have learned these introductory concepts, you'll be all set to make use of the design patterns we cover in the remaining three sections of the book.