Visual Basic .NET Codemaster's Library

Rating:
Summary: Decent samples collection
Review: I am not normally the type of person who would recommend a samples book. Overall, I find most of these types of books either work on too small of a microcosm to make any real impact, or worse, try to tackle "real world" problems that are only "real world" to authors who no longer code for the Enterprise. I was surprised to see that Matt's book fit somewhere in the middle.

On the scale of problem solving, this book is much closer to the microcosm type of book. Unlike most books in this mold, however, the samples are extremely well written. Whether you need a ping application sample, need to know more about using delegates or want some simple guidance through ADO.NET, this book has some info on what you are looking for.

Now, this book is not a deep well. Do not expect to learn everything you need to learn about .NET through the samples in this book. While it covers the basics of ADO.NET, for example, you will not find out how to code extremely complex data driven applications. The info in this book, however, should get you off in the right direction.

Overall, this is a book for the intermediate developer, with some experience in .NET. The beginner will be able to code the examples, but I would recommend getting a bit of grounding in general .NET coding, rather than relying on this book as a primer. As this is not the intent of the author, I do not see this as a major issue.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good for quick solutions
Review: This book is good if you are trying to provides solutions to defined problems that you are stumbling across because you are new to the .Net world. Most of the examples are pretty simple, but that is not to say they are not well done. Tagliaferri gets you going and on your way in most of these examples. When this book came out I grabbed it and went through almost all of the examples. This book will give you good ideas on how to solve particular programming problems that you will encounter while you make the transition from VB6 to VB.Net. This is the first "Oh that's how you would do that book" that's out on VB.net