Rating: 
Summary: The Best .NET Framework Book
Review: Easy reading. Very clear and easy to understand. Recommend it for anyone who wants to start .NET for VB. Full of expert advice.Jeffrey is a big man!I like his book, I learned a lot and will continue to use it as a reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book
Review: Good book if you do not have Richter's first book with C# explanations.. If you do, no use buying this book for it seems there is absolutely no difference in contents between the two..!
Rating:
Summary: An excellant VB.NET/CLR book
Review: I don't understand the reviewer who thinks this book is plagiarized by Jeff's other books. It's obvious that the whole point of this book is that it contains the same content as Jeff's "Applied MS .NET Fx Programming" book since the 2 books have the same title! I for one appreciate that Jeff worked with Francesco to gear a version of Jeff's book for the VB.NET programmer. You wouldn't give a bad review to a book if it were translated from English to Italian, would you?! That's what was done here. Also, I think Jeff's book is awesome and full of really useful information. I love that a version exists specifically for me, a VB programmer! If you're a VB programmer, you should definitely buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for using VB .NET with the .NET Framework
Review: I love Jeffrey Richter's books. Having read the book Applied .NET Framework Programming, I was a bit unsure about picking up this book. Overall, I am glad I did, as there are little nuances to Visual Basic .NET that are not present in C#. I will add a caveat, however. Most people will be satisfied with one book or the other, and not both. The material is almost identical, with only a minor shift in languages. While there is some material that works in C# and not in Visual Basic .NET, and visa versa, a great majority of the material is identical. This may be the reason why a former reviewer panned the book, but I feel that the material should be reviewed on its value, and not how close it is to another book. Like Applied .NET Framework Programming, this book is divided into 5 parts: The first part deals with the CLR and .NET Framework, and, most importantly, how to set up your applications to take advantage of the .NET Framework. Part two deals with types. It works with both value types (like structures and enumerations) and reference types (like classes and arrays). One of the most valuable chapters in this section centers around checking object equality (including overriding Equals) and identity (using Hash codes). Excellent material. Part three deals with designing your own types. The material in this section is a gem for properly designing types, in general, and designing good types for the .NET Framework, in specific. As classes are the core of OOP, most of the types created here are classes (reference types). Part four deals with the essential types in the .NET Framework and how to use them to your advantage. Part five is the real gem of the book, as it deals with how to manage types in your applications. If you do not currently use finally blocks in your exception handler, this book will convince you why you should. Of great use is the info on the IDisposable interface. This book also shows the C# using block, even though there is no equivalent in VB.NET. I certainly hope Microsoft picks this gem up in a future version. I have personally heard Jeffrey speak on the Microsoft campus, and I am quite impressed with the depth and bredth of his knowledge. I have not heard Balena speak, but after this book, and his Visual Basic .NET book, I welcome the opportunity. With books like this, MSPress is taking the crown away from Wrox Press (the former best programming books on the market) ... in a big way.
Rating: 
Summary: A mastery of the material does not make a good book
Review: I recently placed an order for the book. The listing for the book says it usually ships in 1 to 2 days. Once I place the order, I could see that the book would not SHIP for 1.5 weeks! Now I would consider canceling the order, but I can't because it has entered the shipping process. There is still a week before it ships.
Rating:
Summary: Book not really in Stock
Review: I recently placed an order for the book. The listing for the book says it usually ships in 1 to 2 days. Once I place the order, I could see that the book would not SHIP for 1.5 weeks! Now I would consider canceling the order, but I can't because it has entered the shipping process. There is still a week before it ships.
Rating:
Summary: A mastery of the material does not make a good book
Review: Mr. Richter has an incredible mastery of the elements of the .NET Framework. As others have observed, Microsoft development teams could indeed benefit from reading the book. (In fact, there are several instances in which Mr. Richter critiques the implementation that Microsoft has provided and offers his recommendation on how it could be improved.) Unfortunately, you would have to be a member of a Microsoft development team to have enough grounding in the concepts presented here to benefit from Mr. Richter's expertise. What it comes down to is there's a difference between presenting material and providing the tools that enable a learning experience to occur.
Rating:
Summary: An uneven book, part light and part fog
Review: This book is a hit-and-miss affair with good technical points often surrounded by thickets of software obscurantism. To be fair this is not entirely the authors' fault but stems in part from the .NET architecture. The formatting in places is absolutely abyssmal. Code embedded in paragraphs of text and wrapping around lines, for instance. The book is not particularly well written and I found chunks of it very tedious in the extreme. I wasn't convinced that many of the examples were particularly illustrative of what most programmers will want from .NET. However, I suspect that this is the inevitable result of copying everything from the C# version of the book into a the VB version. The book is very definitely stamped with C# thinking though it is ostensibly a VB text. I believe the strategy is mistaken. C# and VB have very different models and will be used (in the main) by different classes of programmer with different needs. These differences are not reflected proportionately in the VB text and made parts of the book seem like a technical dog's dinner. Perhaps if the authors produced a text from the pure VB.NET point of view many of these instances of unevenness could have been avoided.
Rating:
Summary: An uneven book, part light and part fog
Review: This book is a hit-and-miss affair with good technical points often surrounded by thickets of software obscurantism. To be fair this is not entirely the authors' fault but stems in part from the .NET architecture. The formatting in places is absolutely abyssmal. Code embedded in paragraphs of text and wrapping around lines, for instance. The book is not particularly well written and I found chunks of it very tedious in the extreme. I wasn't convinced that many of the examples were particularly illustrative of what most programmers will want from .NET. However, I suspect that this is the inevitable result of copying everything from the C# version of the book into a the VB version. The book is very definitely stamped with C# thinking though it is ostensibly a VB text. I believe the strategy is mistaken. C# and VB have very different models and will be used (in the main) by different classes of programmer with different needs. These differences are not reflected proportionately in the VB text and made parts of the book seem like a technical dog's dinner. Perhaps if the authors produced a text from the pure VB.NET point of view many of these instances of unevenness could have been avoided.
Rating:
Summary: Plagiarism of the first order
Review: This book is a word-for-word copy of Richter's other book, "Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming." The few parts that are not copied directly from Richter's .NET book are copied from Balena's VB.NET book. Both of the sources for this book are rather mediocre, and their offspring is even worse.
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