This book presents itself as an account of a college course, taught by Smiley, in which the students developed a program that allows the customers of a china shop to get price quotes on different table settings. As they work toward delivering the program to the merchant, Smiley's students learn all about figuring out product requirements, designing software, and the many technical details that define Windows programming in general. After quite a bit of planning, Smiley details the mechanics of writing code in Visual Basic 6 (a limited copy of which appears on the book's companion CD-ROM), which eventually enables his students to deliver a working program to the shopkeeper.