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Rating: 
Summary: Not worth lining a bird cage with!!!!!
Review: ...This book was required for a VB .Net programming class I took at a local College. Out of 25 people no one found the book helpful in any area of learning programming. I even talked with some friends in other VB classes that were using the same book and their classmates responses were the same as ours. By midway through the quarter the instructor had all but abandoned using the book as a reference for the class. Instead of being called comprehensive it should have been called incomprehensible!The Author's idea of programming examples is to show just a couple lines of code instead of how the code would be used in a program. The practice exercises call for you to use the author's prewritten code (which you have to download) and alter a couple lines of code to accomplish your task. This is not programming... Most of the subjects that were covered were presented in such a poor method that the reader is left more confused after reading the topic than before. The book was espicially bad on Printing, Collections, Classes, and Load/Save to/from a file. When you try to recreate a program using the author's code and making changes that you are instructed to perform about a third of the time the program will fail and the book provides such poor information that you can not troubleshoot the problem....
Rating: 
Summary: Great teacher, not so great book
Review: I found this book very difficult to use and overly complex for beginner VB.NET programmers. I have been using this book for a class at a local college for about 8 weeks now and have resorted to using other books to help me with my assignments. The things I disliked the most: 1) The book was not designed with ease of use and easy reading in mind. The majority of the book is run-on text. Code samples require more searching to find. 2) Each chapter should have one complete program to learn from. It is far easier to learn how to program when a book includes the code for an entire program that has been presented through walk-throughs in the chapters. Things I liked about the book: 1) The authors did show several coding methods to use to accomplish the same task. Overall though, Neither I, nor my classmates, liked the book. If you are an instructor thinking of selecting this book for your class, don't. Consider the book "Programming in Visual Basic .NET" by Julia Case Bradley and Anita C. Millspaugh instead. It offers everything this book doesn't.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book for VB.NET and ASP.NET
Review: I have been a Visual Basic 6.0 developer for the last two years and decided to upgrade my skills to .NET I found this book very helpful and full of valuable examples and tutorials. The basics of .NET environment are explained well in detail before the actual programming is started and that leaves quite a bit of margin for the readers to fully understand the environment before wetting their hands with code. Topics such as ADO.NET and ASP.NET are also explained in detail. To my surprise this time there is a complete new topic for Crystal Reports and its features, which makes the book an all in one resource. I would recommend this book to all the beginners and skilled VB developers as well. Thanks !!
Rating:
Summary: Great for responsible and interested learners!
Review: I have been using this book in concert with another book to teach a two-semester course that covers an introduction to programming logic and design and business programming to MIS students. I have to say that it is like all textbooks, it is not perfect. It could go a little deeper on the explanations of code segments and probably should include additional topics like XML processing and Web services.For these reasons it received 4 stars instead of 5. However, for those of you that have dismissed this text, both students and instructors, you entirely missed the point and utility of the text. The style of presentation is wonderful and not disjointed. Students that complain about this text are unwilling to play a little 'connect the dots' on their own and teachers that want to cater to this type of student should rethink their strategy. If you want a textbook that will hold your hand and keep you from having to think too hard, then try another book. For the faint of heart I suggest the book by Zak and practically anyone else. The Bradley and Millspaugh books were on their way to being on the same level as Ekedahl and Newman, but missed the boat.
Rating:
Summary: Not for absolute beginners.
Review: I have been using this book in my VB class for 4 months in local community college. The only people who like this book are teachers! I had to read the chapters at least twice to understand what the auther is explaining. Chapter 6 is especially bad, in the chapter the auther completed half the code in the example and completely ignored to explain them. The graphic part of this book was very difficult to understand. The code example (the one that completed by author, you can download from publisher) in Chapter 6 gives wrong result when you run the solution for print out. The first several chapters were OK, but as it gets harder the author is not so kind to the students, he skips explanations even though it is a new concept. As a result we were forced to use other books, lab assistants, and so forth to complete our work. The good part is I was forced to be an independent thinker, since we cannot count on author to explan subjects. If you are using this book in the class or other environment in which some help is available to you, then this book is somewhat acceptable. Just do not use this book if you are thinking to learn VB on your own. I know that most of the programming books are not easy to read and programming students have a lot of work to do, even then this book is sub-standard.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as it gets for VB.NET books
Review: I thought the book was very helpful. Each chapter has a tutorial that takes you step by step to learn the material. It lists out all the relevant properties of controls and lets you know what each one does. The book explains a lot and uses pictures and screen shots to help. Yes, some of it is hard to understand, but almost every programming book has an element of this as it is not an easy task to learn a new language and it's not easy to explain it well through text alone. I wish the book would have covered more ASP.NET(only one chapter) and more on crystal reports. If you are just starting out this is a GREAT book. Even if you don't totally understand what the author is saying, you can still easily follow the tutorial step by step and will pick it up. I think books that uses tutorials are much easier to work with. If your confused there's always an easy to learn example.
Rating:
Summary: Class revolt over this book
Review: It's funny how perspectives from a programmer and a beginner differ so greatly on this text. I am a very successful 30 something student at a major university. I think I am qualified to say, from a beginner's standpoint, that this book leaves much to be desired. I will retread some of the same points others have made here.
The book is intentionally vague: As beginners, students need to grasp basic programming concepys and styles. This text seems to often avoid explaining these basic concepts. The text also does not offer examples of good efficient code or practices. The teacher materials (assignments) intentionally ask for things not discussed in the chapters, The exams are designed to trick the student rather than test understanding of concepts. Forcing sheer memorization over understanding is a bad way to start learning. Example: Which of the following are properties of the Color Structure? a. R,G,B / b. ColorRed,ColorBlue,ColorRed / c. Alpha / d. All of the above - if you answered A you are correct -but Alpha is also a property of the color structure. That's not inportant. A is the answer.
Examples sometimes don't work: Code examples in Chapter 6 fail to work. What's worse, the publisher's web site does not correct this issue. If you plan on drawing text onto a form prepare to do some reading on the outside in order to accomplish this task.
Not easy to read: As mentioned, this text is full of run on sentenses, disjointed and technical. Technical is good, but some plain english explanations would help the BEGINNER to grasp concepts.
Class revolt over the text: As mentioned, students in my class have openly criticized this text. (They actually begged the teacher to just code in VB and explain what's happening over usung the text) These complaints were brought to not only to the teacher, but to the head of the department.
If you are teacher and want to teach VB to beginners, look at some of the other suggestions posted here. This text makes learning VB a chore. People want to be challenged, but also have fun learning something as powerful and simple as VB.NET.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly Organized and Non-Functional Examples
Review: This is one of the worst books I've used to teach a programming language course. I'm sorry I let the university talk me into using it. The book is organized around examples rather than concepts. As a result, each chapter is full of a disjointed collection of concepts -- a poor idea for an introductory programming course. In addition, many examples do not work, forcing the instructor to debug the examples. If you're looking for a good introductory book for Visual Basic .Net, I suggest "Visual Basic .Net How to Program", 2nd Ed (ISBN: 0130293636) by Dietel, Dietel, and Nieto.
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