An Introduction to Programming with Visual Basic.NET, Fifth Edition

Rating:
Summary: for absolutelly beginner in programming
Review: if you don't know know anything about programming, and you have to use visual basic, you should use this book. after reading it at least until chapter 8, and you want to read books like Deitel&deitel or Coding Technique, i believe you will understand it much3x better.

Rating:
Summary: for absolutelly beginner in programming
Review: if you don't know know anything about programming, and you have to use visual basic, you should use this book. after reading it at least until chapter 8, and you want to read books like Deitel&deitel or Coding Technique, i believe you will understand it much3x better.

Rating:
Summary: Lot of practice problems
Review: The best way to learn a computer language is the same as the best way of learning a human language, you need to practice. That's why practice problems are essential to any beginner's book to any programming language. This book has BY FAR the most practice problems for the VB.net learners. It also has detailed and useful explaination of basic VB.net concepts. What you learn in this book will provide a solid framwork for more complicated VB.net subjects.

Rating:
Summary: This book is just like a...
Review: The way this book is written the author throws you a scrap of information and does not reinforce this scrap whatsoever and thus leaves you confused, stressed, and upset !

This may sound harsh, but please do not purchase this book unless required to do so by your university (like me). I am an MIS major, and must admit my serious weakness is in programming. This book has done nothing to help me ! If you are a programming person, pickup this book and you'll enjoy. If you are more of a systems administrator type and you know programming knowledge is necessary, but are not the programming type then run far, far away from this book !

Rating:
Summary: Not my first choice....
Review: This book is not a good one for "Introduction" to Programming using VB. My opinion obviously, but I find the book to draw way too many assumptions about what the reader already knows about VB. Reading this text I find myself re-reading over and over again the concepts that I am supposed to learn. The author throws out several concepts, definitions and terms all within one sentence. It is difficult to digest. Have a pen ready with lots of ink- you will have to make your own notes to make sense of it. I have only read 130 pages and was forced to buy another text to fill in the gaps. Too bad- the other text is quite good (Murach's Beginning VB) but this is not the book used for my class. There are a billion examples- for me the approach that works best is type out every example and just study it with the help the other text, websites and online help. Perhaps is this is the best way to get it done- but I personally feel learning this way is too labor intensive.

Rating:
Summary: Not my first choice....
Review: This book is not a good one for "Introduction" to Programming using VB. My opinion obviously, but I find the book to draw way too many assumptions about what the reader already knows about VB. Reading this text I find myself re-reading over and over again the concepts that I am supposed to learn. The author throws out several concepts, definitions and terms all within one sentence. It is difficult to digest. Have a pen ready with lots of ink- you will have to make your own notes to make sense of it. I have only read 130 pages and was forced to buy another text to fill in the gaps. Too bad- the other text is quite good (Murach's Beginning VB) but this is not the book used for my class. There are a billion examples- for me the approach that works best is type out every example and just study it with the help the other text, websites and online help. Perhaps is this is the best way to get it done- but I personally feel learning this way is too labor intensive.

Rating:
Summary: BEST BOOK FOR BEGINNING BUISNESS APPLICATIONS+ PROJECTS
Review: this book is very good for new to vb.net people specilly for buisness like applications and i think this is the best book if u wanna self study the vb.net it has everything except the graphics(they're coverd a little bit),do u know why i think this book is very good because it has flowcharts, it has programming excersizes and on top of that lots of examples. But the major reason i bought this book because this book has projects assignments which i dont find in many books, i carefully searched for many days for the good book and then decided to buy this one.if ur college has three semesters for visual basic programming this book will cover atleasat two and half semester or "two semesters" for sure. i'll recommend this book to anyone who is a beginner programmer or a little better than beginner. THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR PRO PROGRAMMERS.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous coverage but may not cover all you want
Review: This is a reworking of Schneider's earlier VB book(s). It is important at the outset to grasp that this book, like his others, is written from a traditional data processing perspective (ubiquitous bank/loan account examples). Strong emphasis on structured programming is demonstrated throughout. So it's quite traditional in how it approaches topics. It has a marvellous collection of exercises both short and project based. If you can work through these, you will have a very good knowledge of traditional core programming skills. And this is the key point of the text: it is primarily about teaching you how to program using VB.net as the instruction medium and not anything else.

This is no quick tips and tools book, though it obviously contains such. Secondly, it is not a how to do GUIs book. You won't find much here on building multimedia applications or graphical games. Instead, the book offers a shoehorning of masses of programming techniques into the VB.net environment. And the work is very high quality both in terms of the examples and their pedagogical value.

In terms of layout, the book is particularly good. For a start it more or less lies flat when you open it. Colour coding of programs is used, and each chaper and topic is illustrated with clearly flagged example code and displays. There is no shortage of well developed code, (though some of the examples may seem a little conservative).

The first two thirds of the book introduces a bit of history and traditional programming thinking: procedures, decision logic, loops, arrays and files. The remainder deals with controls, OO in VB.net and database access. The OO chapter uses a reasonable number of examples to convey techniques and the exercises are interesting, but it is introductory (don't expect a crash course in abstract datatypes). However the chapter has but one graphics based example which is a bit mean.

While the book has exemplary strengths over and above the majority in the field, there are a few weaknesses which indicate the need for at least one supplementary text.

In the first place, the book has nothing to say on GDI+ programming, and many will judge this oversight as a serious flaw. Secondly, the multiple document interface capacity of VB.net (changed somewhat from VB6) is not developed. Indeed with the exception of three pages on adding multiple forms (482-485), the rationale for multiwindowed displays is completely overlooked. In fairness, the book is not focused around user interface design issues (either a strength or a weakness depending on your needs).

The chapter on databases access is good but just above elementary. However, don't expect a run down on web servers and XML. These topics are not covered. Even a brief chapter on XML would not be out of place.

From a slightly more pedantic position, I am surprised that there is no general chapter on data structures. Arrays are given a very handsome chapter, and sorting a searching are developed well, but we don't explore explicitly stacks and queues. Now one of the strengths of VB.net is that stack and queue creation and manipulation are made trivial due to inbuilt functions. It would have been useful to see these in action. Moreover, trees and graphs are not covered, and that is a bit of a puzzle.

Overall the book is a superb programming text. Dated perhaps in some of its focus, but still a better introduction to programming than many notionally equivalent texts, which are perhaps more glamorous, but almost certainly less thoughtful.