VB. NET for Developers

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Summary: VB .NET helped our team begin .NET development!!!
Review: I am a project lead and have been struggling with various resources on .NET and had a tough time determining where to begin my venture into this new technology. I found this to be a terrific book and it has helped me learn various features of the new IDE and language. I particularly appreciated the before and after style of written that was done. For example, you will find many topics explained similar to, "In VB 5/6 this is how you would implement a class. In VB .NET the implementation would look like this..."

My project team was looking for a common point to begin their learning as well, so I encouraged (made...) them purchase this book. The fact that we have this common ground to begin our development has helped us tremendously.

I would highly recommend this book for those looking into .NET development. The book reads well, the examples thoughtful and straightforward, and the material covered is quite extensive. Enjoy!

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Summary: Inadequate and misleading
Review: I have been prograaming VB for nine years now and consider myself to be intermediate to advanced. This book simply does not cover the new VB.net in sufficient details. New methods and properties are not explained whilst dealing with other new methods or properties. A good exmaple is the string class. This is not explained, just used, when giving a code example. Also, the examples are incorrect, in many places. I went to the website ... and they hadn't even bothered to correct the code there.
I'm sure there must be better books out by now. If

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Summary: Not enough detail and too much repetition
Review: I stopped reading not even half way through. The author gives an overview for the chapter that explains quite a bit about each topic. Then, when the topic is revisited, basically states the same as was covered in the overview. As a result, the book could have been a lot shorter without the redundancy makig it even more expensive per page of real content than other reviewers have noted.

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Summary: Not enough detail and too much repetition
Review: I used this book as a preparation for the Beta exam. It was pretty useless. It has many typographical and code errors such that it looks like it was thrown together at short notice. With at least one chapter, the technical content very questionable. Very much a rush job in my opinion.

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Summary: The title is misleading
Review: If you're a seasoned VB developer looking for a book to get you up to speed quickly on dot net this is the one! "VB.NET for Developers" is a readible, concise intro to dot net that I gobbled up in less than 2 weeks.

But wait...it's more. It has sections on COM+ services, ADO.NET, and calling Windows APIs via Interop among other advanced topics.

If you're looking for a good "first" dot net book then you just found it!

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Summary: Outstanding dot net overview and more.
Review: If you're a seasoned VB developer looking for a book to get you up to speed quickly on dot net this is the one! "VB.NET for Developers" is a readible, concise intro to dot net that I gobbled up in less than 2 weeks.

But wait...it's more. It has sections on COM+ services, ADO.NET, and calling Windows APIs via Interop among other advanced topics.

If you're looking for a good "first" dot net book then you just found it!

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Summary: A bit overpriced, more on the IDE than VB .NET
Review: My first thought, after seeing this book, was what a small book for 40 bucks. After thumbing through the pages, I still think it is a bit small, but I am more impressed with its content.

This book, much like "Designing Visual Basic.NET Applications", is as much a book on the Visual Studio .NET IDE as it is on Visual Basic .NET. Unlike the aforementioned tome, this book has plenty of screenshots to help you navigate the IDE.

In all fairness, there is a good amount of code in this book, for its size. I just wish there were more. If you are looking for an advanced book, look the other way.

The saving grace of this book is its help in navigating the Visual Studio .NET IDE. If you want to learn the tool as much as you want to learn the language, this is not a bad buy. For books in this price range the O'Reilly Nutshell book is much better.

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Summary: How Technical Books Should Be Written
Review: The trouble with most books on technologies like .NET is they try to be all things to all people, and end up being either too shallow or far too long.

This book is a very welcome exception. This is how technical books should be written: no messing about, no unnecessary repetition, but all the material is covered clearly in about 250 pages. A very clear target audience (experienced VB6 developers), and clear objectives help - the book's intention is clearly to communicate the essentials, and the practitioner will then get more detail from other sources. It's one of the few books of its type which can be read from cover to cover.

The book isn't perfect: I spotted a few proof-reading errors (in an early copy based on the Beta version of VS.NET); some examples are a little difficult to follow, and some topics inevitably rather sketchy.

However, I can thoroughly recommend this book, although I suggest that the serious VB developer will probably need other volumes as well: I also purchased "ASP.NET for Developers" by Amundsen & Litwin, and "The Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library" by Powers & Snell, both in the same series from Sams.