Well,in order to understand clearly Visual Basic, yes you should take a training course but if you only want to program in Visual Basic,only e-books could help. If you are not missing my point, let us compare to HTML using notepad and dreamweaver. If you really want to understand HTML, then you need to do hard code using notepad but if you want to simplify things and do shortcuts without profound understanding of each tags then you will go for dreamweaver.