10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible, deficient book, definitely not for "beginners", April 30, 2008
This review is from: Beginning VB 2008: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in .NET) (Paperback)
Flipping through this book in the store, it seemed like a good choice because it appeared to try to use coherent projects to teach rather than going the way of most horrible programming books that just isolate topics on one or two pages and never explain how it all works together ("Chapter 44: How to place a radio button. Click the tools tab, then select radio button. Place on form. Chapter 45: How to place a text box..." etc).
The other main reason I bought this book was because it actually has exercises at the end of the chapters, and promises that solutions are available on the publisher's website. This is another feature most programming books sadly lack. For anyone wanting to learn outside of a classroom, there is usually no way to test or check your own progress.
Well, this book sourly disappointed on both these supposed advantages. While it does try to implement the concepts within whole projects, it does this at the expense of teaching you Visual Basic. The details are sorely lacking. After three chapters, very little has actually been explained. I've learned a bit about how to make text appear in a text box by clicking a button, about variable types and a few functions for manipulating numbers and strings. But very little about how to actually make things work together.
Chapter three has you making a "translator" program that will take simple greetings and translate them from one language to another. For example, English "hello" to German "hallo." The first half of the chapter simply covers how to write a command prompt program to get "hello" to go to "hallo" reliably, while the rest talks a lot about language and culture settings in .NET and how to manipulate them. Where are this author's priorities? Is that really relevant yet? You would think he'd wait to cover that later and instead teach you how to use a radio button or something. Then, after giving nothing more than bare bones to work with, at the end of the chapter the exercise is to "finish" the translator, adding in the ability to translate both ways and to select different languages to translate to or from. This is all without having given you ANY idea how to implement any controls on a window or form (aside from making "hello world" appear in a text box by clicking a button). Umm... so how are you supposed to do this? To select a language, for example, you would need a control in the window to do that, but so far he has not given even the slightest idea of how that would work.
It seems to me the author was simply extremely lazy and figured you should just read the Microsoft documentation for the petty details. Also, I think he really doesn't understand the perspective that a novice would have. The things he chooses to explain seem pointless for a beginner to know, while the things he glosses over are more relevant. He is more concerned with getting philosophical about whether it is the user's responsibility to make sure there are no extra spaces in the word he types, or the programmer's responsibility to anticipate that there might be extra spaces. Seriously, he spends a whole page on that. What a joke. In addition, the code that he DOES explain is really never explained in full. For example, I've typed "Public Shared Function" many times now and don't recall ever seeing the "public" or "shared" parts explained. Some functions in the book are only "public" and I don't know the difference. A few words on that kind of thing might help. The author really spends very little time at all trying to explain the basic structure of the language, it's logic and flow. He just has you typing out lines of code right away, telling you what it does as a whole but rarely explaining the parts.
As far as the exercises and solutions go, well, there are no answers on the website. I downloaded what was available there, and guess what? It's just the examples from the book typed out for you. There isn't a shred of anything that can't already be found in the book. So if you're baffled about how to complete that translator application, you're out of luck. I'm used to learning things on my own and usually do very well at it, but a decent book is a necessity. This book is terrible. Avoid.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good Topics, bad description, February 26, 2008
This review is from: Beginning VB 2008: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in .NET) (Paperback)
This book is really only 2 or 3 stars, but I couldn't find a way to change my rating.
I purchased this book because I liked what the table of contents had to offer. I'm currently working on a Java app and can see that how to accomplish most of the important features of that app in VB.net are covered.
However, now that I've been reading thru the book, I question a) the author's methods of explaining, and in some cases b) his actual explanation.
As the review for the C# version of the book mentions. The author uses analogies extremely literally. This gets very annoying to say the least. It almost like there is an analogy every other page.
I also have a problem with the examples he uses throughout the book. His resume discusses his background in financial apps. He obviously wanted to make use of this as every example I've seen so far is based on finance. But this means in some cases, you spend more time trying to understand the purpose of the app, then understanding the point he's trying to make.
Finally, I'm on chapter 7 now where he discusses Interfaces, Method Overriding, Method Overloading. I find his examples of Interfaces rather poor as they never show the purpose of Interfaces enforcing contracts among various classes. He implements an Interface in a base class, which makes no sense to me, since that interface would probably only get used in 1 place then. He also never discusses Method Overloading as creating the same method names with different signitures. He treats Overloading and Overriding as exactly the same thing.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beginning VB 2008: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in .Net), March 18, 2008
This review is from: Beginning VB 2008: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in .NET) (Paperback)
It's an ok, but not for an absolute beginner. I would say it's for the advanced beginner to intermediate. I've been learning VB.NET for about a year and this book really helped me grasp the concepts associated with creating classes and structured code.
For the absolute beginner, read Visual Basic 2008 Step by Step before reading this book.
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