Rating: 
Summary: Project Lead/Software Developer
Review: You have to read this book, before you spend thousands on a VB.NET course.I read Mr Shapiro's first VB.NET book in late 2001 and made up my mind that I needed to make the move from VB to VB.NET asap. I am a VB/ASP programmer still struggling with OO design concepts and patterns, and I find his insight into the software development and design process quite remarkable indeed. He writes with a wit and with metaphors I have not seen elsewhere, and made tackling the complex subjects much easier more me. You'll be chuckling at some of the stuff he says. I find it hard to learn from computer books and prefer classrooms, but reading even the first 30 percent of this book, has saved me a bundle in time and money. I am more concerned about code than classes and figured that the new OO in .NET would put me off. But I was especially pleased to see Mr Shapiro tackle stuff like merge sort and quicksort and then place them in context with various .NET "features" like delegates, and interfaces. Incidently, if understanding interfaces and delegates has you scratching your head, this is the only book I found, browsing at the bookstore, that devotes a whole chapter to each subject respectively. At first I thought his notes on why Sun hates delegates would not be much use to me but they go a long way to understanding why .NET has delegates and interfaces and Java only has interfaces. There is also a very comprehensive linked-list example in this book that shows you exactly how to implement interfaces, like IEnumerator, and IList, stuff which very few seem to understand and which are very alien to a VB programmer. No book is perfect. There are a few typos in the text which are clearly last minute changes the publisher forgot to correct. The source code examples compile without issue. I will be looking for his next book for sure.
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