VB .NET in 60 Minutes a Day

Rating:
Summary: Good classroom in a book for newcomers
Review: This is a surprisingly useful book for newcomers to Visual Basic.NET. Buy it for the book, itself, not for the online presentation.

The book comes with an accompanying website with audio/visual presentation for each chapter consisting of a PowerPoint presentation along with audio. Warning: You can only view the presentation with a high speed broadband connection. Dial-up can only get the audio and sometimes not even the audio. The online presentations are fine, but the value comes from the book itself, not the online presentation.

I usually shy away from books with phrases like "In a weekend", "in 24 hours", "hour-a-day crash course" etc. You really can't learn a new programming language in a few hours. HOWEVER, THESE BOOKS ARE AN EXCEPTION. The authors don't try to convince you that you can expect to learn VB.NET in a weekend. If you do all the lessons (some of which may take a bit more than an hour) plus try to do a few original applications on your own, from scratch, you WILL get a very good foundation of the subjects being taught. It will take about 4 - 6 weeks to go through the entire book (not 24 hours or a weekend, like other books promise), based on 60 - 90 minutes a day 5 or 6 days a week.

I own both the VB.NET and the ASP.NET (which is also VB.NET based) books and recommended them to my students who wanted to learn VB.NET.

This books is designed for people who don't have the money or the time to attend a live, in-class course on the VB.NET. The authors anticipate, in advance, some of the questions you might ask to a live instructor if you were learning VB.NET in a classroom environment. According to the authors, they have taken their own experience as instructors and put that experience into the book. It works pretty well.

Two caveats:

(1) the book doesn't cover everything about .NET or about VB.NET or about the .NET Framework. It's provides a self-study, introductory course on VB.NET. If you complete the book, then you will be in good shape to take on some more advanced topics such as the details of ADO.NET (an entire subject in itself, check out Murach Publisher's Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET by Doug Lowe, Anne Prince - ISBN: 1890774197 for that) and ASP.NET (check out Wiley Publisher's ASP.NET in 60 Minutes a Day by Glenn Johnson, ISBN: 0-471-43023-4 for that or Mike Murach Publisher's Murach's ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET by Doug Lowe, Anne Prince ISBN: 1890774200 for that).

(2) The online presentations are only available to broadband subscribers. However, even without the videos, this would be a great introductory book for beginners who cannot take a classroom course on Web development using VB.NET and ASP.NET.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book let down by poor support
Review: Visual Basic.Net in 60 Minutes reads well from the beginning. The tutorial-style presentation is an excellent idea, with each chapter supported by an introductory streaming video presentation by Bruce Barstow, hosted on Wiley's web site. The only problem is that the video intros don't work after chapter 3 which is a real let-down. Wiley's "Technical Support" has, as yet, produced no response, despite repeated emails plus a not inexpensive international phone call to have this issue rectified.

In summary, an excellent read for a programmer with some VB experience moving across to this VERY different world of VB.NET, but will disappoint anyone intending to use the advertised on-line lectures until (if/when??) Wiley get their act together & get these videos working beyond chapter 3!