Mastering Visual Basic .NET [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Evangelos Petroutsos (Author) "WELCOME TO THE ENTERPRISE Edition of Visual Basic NET..." (more)
Key Phrases: active child form, building custom classes, custom comparer, End Sub, Private Sub, End Function (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Visual Basic .NET is much more than an update of VB 6: It's now a fully object-oriented language that takes advantage of Microsoft's new, feature-rich .NET framework. Mastering Visual Basic .NET is a comprehensive treatment of the language and the framework, from the beginning steps to advanced application development. You'll find detailed tutorials combined with practical, real-world projects and a vast amount of reference material to get you up and running with VB .NET in no time. To shorten the learning curve for experienced VB 6 programmers, this book contains dozens of special notes describing the differences between the old and the new ways of doing things. Mastering Visual Basic .NET thoroughly covers the development environment, language elements, object-oriented programming, and the .NET framework, along with such advanced topics as database programming and web programming. It's everything you need to become a VB .NET expert.

From the Publisher
Mastering Visual Basic .NET is the update to the best-selling Mastering Visual Basic 6, by Evangelos Petroutsos. Because of the enormous changes introduced by .NET, Petroutsos has rewritten his book from the ground up. In contrast to some other large VB.NET books, Petroutsos is the only author of the Mastering. For the reader, the benefit is a unified author voice and continuity in the examples, which is not found in many other big books on VB. And the examples are not trivial. Instead of using simplistic examples to demonstrate isolated points, Petroutsos shows actual applications and ties them together.

The book goes into highly specific detail about topics given short shrift in other books. For example, Petroutsos goes beyond showing you how to populate an array; he also shows how to save the array to a disk file. In the printing chapter, he doesn’t just show how to print a few lines of text; he shows how to print a text file (including the logic to break long lines), and how to print tabular data and bitmaps.

Mastering Visual Basic .NET is the perfect book for upgraders from VB6 and includes special “VB6 to VB.NET” sidebars throughout, which highlights special points for upgraders. The book is suitable for beginners who have had some programming experience, but goes well beyond the basics, covering Windows Forms, Web Forms, and database programming with ADO.NET. Readers who want more in-depth coverage of database and Web programming can go on to Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming (by Petroutsos and Asli Bilgin) and Mastering ASP.NET with VB.NET (by Russell Jones).

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Sybex (December 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0782128777
• ISBN-13: 978-0782128772
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.6 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #219,047 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #16 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > Basic
  #19 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > Visual Basic Introduction
  #57 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Development > Visual Basic > .Net

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unequaled!, January 17, 2002

By A Customer

I've been trying my hand and programming for a couple of years now, and have picked up the basics of Perl and Delphi. I was always tempted to use VB6, mostly due to the massive volume of books and other resources dedicated to it -- but I never found a newbie book that I could read all the way through. The books I tried typically covered specific concepts well (i.e., syntax, controls, events, procedures, etc.), but failed to tie everything together to show me how to build a sophisticated application. Couple that with code errors and writing that failed to "grip" me, and I was left with several half-read volumes and no real desire to use VB.

With this book, and the incredible changes to VB that come with .NET, all that's changed. This book starts with an awesome overview of the IDE, including in Chapter 2 a walkthrough of two relatively simple programs that demonstrate how applications are built in VB .NET. The author walks you through the creation of a loan calculator, then a math calculator, all the while explaining the components used, how to code them, and how to run, debug, and build your project with the VS .NET tools. If that weren't enough, you learn to combine these projects in a multiple form solution in which you create a separate form that can call the forms created in the first two projects. Finally, the author shows how to create the loan calculator project as a web application. This is all pretty amazing stuff, and it's all in Chapter 2! While some concepts aren't thoroughly detailed, the author notes where you can learn more about each topic in subsequent chapters of the book. So, if the material in Chapter 2 is too difficult to grasp the first time around, jump to Chapters 3 and 4, where the VB .NET language is introduced, and then come back to Chapter 2 after you've learned more about the language and how it works.

This book is a masterpiece -- it is clearly written, and all the code samples I've tried have worked. Although the text claims that some programming experience is required, I think a smart, curious reader will be able to learn how to program from this book -- the above-described Chapter 2, for example, teaches more about programming in VB than some entire books on the subject. If you're a complete newbie and the material is daunting, try one of Greg Perry's beginning programming books to get your feet wet, then come back to this to learn VB .NET.

I agree with other reviewers who say that web apps get slightly short shrift -- web apps are covered, but this book is definitely geared more toward desktop apps. For me, that's no criticism, and I agree that web programming in VB .NET could be a separate volume all together.

In short, this book is one of the best I've ever seen on programming in general, and I've yet to see a better volume on VB .NET, especially for beginner to intermediate programmers.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Put this one back, July 10, 2003

By A Customer

I found this book to be riddled with errors both in the text and the programming examples. The exercises left out key information and required additional debugging and programming just to make them work correctly. Several of his screen examples did not display the correct information and were misleading. Other screens examples might have been semantically correct, but were not correct within the context they were presented.

In my opinion the book also presented the information backwards, the concept of creating custom controls and such was covered in the beginning of the book while database access and file access were covered at the end.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brent, October 11, 2002

By	Brent Richards (Newport Beach, ca United States) - See all my reviews

This is definatly a good beginners book for visual basic .net. You don't need to know anything about programming at all to get started. It covers all the commonly used controls and objects. As far as the word "Mastering" in the title, I'm not so sure. It gives you just enough to get by, then you need something else to get further.. For that I recommend Troelsen's Visual Basic .NET an advanced guide. For beginning and intermediate VB programmers this is a GREAT book, everyone else take the other.