Customer Reviews

OOP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C#(TM) .NET Step by Step (Step by Step (Microsoft))

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is an excellent tutorial for VBers who are moving to DotNet and who want to break all the bad habits picked up over the years. I have, by the way, just described myself. The book does a very good job bringing object theory down to earth and showing how to implement objects in both VB.Net and C#.

If you are new to objects, this book will show you why object programmers swear by the approach--it really does make it easier to write scalable, reusable code. It also helps the developer avoid the "house of cards" syndrome as a program grows beyond its original scope.

If you have had plenty of object theory, but struggle to translate objects to code, this book will get you over the hump. Examples show how to implement inheritance, acggregation, and association.

I would recommend starting with this book, then reading Rosenberg, "Use Case Driven Object Modeling With UML", which teaches an object-oriented development process. Fowler, "UML Distilled" is another great text. Finally, dig into Gamma et al (the "Gang of Four"), "Design Patterns". These books really will change the way you code.

Postscript: Having worked through the examples in the first half of the book, I continue to be impressed. Reynolds-Haertle does a very nice job of illustrating most of the constructs one uses to get day-to-day jobs done. For example, she includes several examples of collections built with the .Net ArrayList construct. Later, she shows an example of a collection built with a Dictionary construct, and discusses benefits and drawbacks of each type. If you are a VBer who (like me) is somewhat bewildered by the collection classes in .Net, this book does a very nice job sorting them out.

I've completed every exercise in this book, and I am amazed at the accuracy. Everyone who's ever gone through a software tutorial book learns to put up with various 'bugs' in the examples, but you don't have to with this book. They've been checked & double checked by some editor who did a great job.

I highly recommend you use the CD that comes with this book only for the .bmp's & .mdb referenced in the examples. Typing the examples is a great way to learn these concepts.

And speaking of the concepts... I've been a VB'er since version 3. .NET brings a completely new way of thinking to VB development, and that makes this book a must. The OO concepts are taught well in this book, and I didn't notice any 'legacy' thinking anywhere.

Hidden thoughout this book is a brief lesson on UML, and the last chapter does a great job of introducing coding standards recommended for .NET... which are quite different from previous versions.

Another benefit of this book is that it shows VB & C# examples next to each other. Even if you've never coded in C, it's facinating to see how close VB is now to C in the .NET domain. I didn't do the C# exercises, but I'd guess this is about the best way a VB developer could pick up the basics of C#.

One more plug: Each chapter has a time estimate on the first page. I found this great for self goal-setting. Since I did one chapter each night after work, it was nice to know what time I could expect to finish. It helped me stay motivated throughout.

The Good

I chose this book for a class in object-oriented programming that I gave in November 2002. For the most part, I was very pleased with this book, and the feedback I received about it from my students was positive as well. The author did a good job of explaining the concepts clearly and concisely, and most of the book is dedicated to the step-by-step completion of hands-on exercises. For this particular class, I relied on the book for most of the instruction and hands-on portions, and I found that this book worked very well for a one week long class. I personally thought that it was very useful to have both Visual Basic and C# examples side-by-side in the book. However, I did notice that when typing in the labs from the book, students often would type the VB code instead of the C# (C# was the language used for this particular class).

The fact that the examples all worked and were very clearly explained in the text both were huge positives for me. If I were teaching the class over again, I think I would definitely choose this book once more. If I were a student looking to learn object-oriented programming by example, then this would be a good book to pick up. If I wanted to learn more about the design and theory behind of OOP, another book would probably be a better choice.

The Less Good

There were only a few things about this book that I didn't care for or that I received negative feedback from students on. The first one isn't the book's fault at all, and that is the fact that all of the examples are for windows forms. As an ASP.NET programmer myself, I would have preferred to have seen the book use ASP.NET for more of its examples. This was a very minor complaint, however. Also, although I very much liked the support for both VB and C#, I think that something should be done within the text to ensure that the C# and VB code samples are set apart more obviously. Many students were confused by this and would end up looking at or even typing in the wrong code for examples because the VB and C# code was interspersed without much visual separation.

The single biggest complain I received from students about the text was that the examples were very difficult to relate to. These were IT workers with experience building ASP and VB applications, and they were disappointed by the samples because they did not correspond to anything that they could see themselves writing in the workplace. The bank account samples were the exception to this, and were well-received, but the card games and vector algebra applications ended up detracting from students' abilities to grasp the concepts involved because they were too busy trying to figure out what the game or mathematical program was doing. A greater focus on business problem domain examples would have helped many of my students, I think, to relate to the topics being described by the examples.

It's about...time! Someone has finally put object-oriented programming into language that I can understand! It's not dumbed down by any standard, but easy-to-read, easy-to-understand, and and incredibly informative. I don't think I've seen any other books by this author, (maybe it's her first), but I sure would like to. A+++

If you are a VB6 programmer itching to learn about the new OOP features of VB.NET, this is the place to start. It walks you through a broad spectrum of examples, and unlike many other .NET books, it actually uses Visual Studio.NET instead of notepad. Very helpful book.

This book was extremely helpful to me in getting my feet wet in object eriented programming. I have always written in languages that didn't have objects so I knew programming but was not sure how to translate the problem into objects and books that teach object oriented languages didn't seem to discuss the subject much. This book, however, gave me the basics in a clear and understandable way. I am now ready for a more involved look at object oriented programming. Highly recommended!!

I just spent the last couple of days reading Robin A. Reynolds-Haertle's book OOP with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step by Step by Microsoft Press, 2002 (ISBN 0-7356-1568-3).

Overall this is a good book to purchase for someone starting out in OOP from a VB background or is using C# as their first modern OOP language. The flow of the book is easy with lots of code samples. Note that every example has both VB and C# code. For this reason, I will be highly recommending this book to classic VB'ers. While it helps move the developer into OOP, they can quickly learn how to read in C#. Despite the loyalty that many have to VB and that "Edit and Continue" is back with Whidbey, reading C# is career critical.

I particularly like Chapter 10 - Using Classes Interchangeably Through Polymorphism. I admit, I'm not much of a graphics person, but this was a great example of using classes and abstracting the requirement of numerous class names. Many of the examples are simple in nature and only one is a console app. Despite the simplicity of the concept of the examples, the codes are rich in OOP technology.

For those coming from a Java or C++ background, they need not pick it up the for themselves. There are a few items that very quickly will cause some readers to lose credibility in the text quickly. Ms. Reynolds-Haertle takes a few liberties to help the VB (pre .NET) developer understand some terms. For example, on page 9 the author states,

In this book, I use the word set to mean changing a property. I use the word get to mean retrieving the value of a property. The Get ans Set blocks as a property can be called getters and setters, or accessors.

While I use to refer to properties as getters and setters, I have changed my vocab to reflect java and C++ standards and the standards of many other C# professionals. Therefore, I would never refer to both of these as accessors. I use the terms accessors and mutators respectively. Interestingly, several books on my shelf from the .NET camp refer to only accessors. So maybe I harp for no reason. What do you think?

In conslusion, VB'ers get this book! Then follow up with several of the books listed in the references. You will be on your way to writing efficient code.

New to .NET framework with some VB background, this is a fascinating book. I want to learn OOP, and this book is it. Once I start it, I can't stop. This book talks about all kinds of inheritances, interface, components, and introduces you to various .NET project types. Most samples have 3 or more related classes. Some even implement additional interfaces. This is an excellent book especially if you are interested in GUI process, drag and drop, design controls for the toolbox, playing with images. Examples are rich, maybe too rich for me now. I'm sure it will take me another round to totally absorb the material. I was right with the book through the Read Books, Bank Accounts, Saving Data, to some degree the Deck of Cards and the Train. I would trade the Memory Game and Pattern Design for any business applications. Maybe the author's next book will provide examples more related to orders, inventory, shipment, accounting, etc. The two languages format is an extra benefit for me to learn C# later and read it again.

Not a bad book. Just typing the code, without reading all of the explanations, helped me piece together what was being illustrated, and that's a big plus. I come from vb background and have been programmer for many years.

On the minus, there were certain pieces of code which were not clear (for example, using of shared members without introducing what shared members were).

Some examples did not work on my computer, although the folks at experts-exchange.com were able to help me. The book does have syntax errors but microsoft has not made public any fixes to the book material.

The books starts to use very many complex objects, such as drawing objects, etc. without introducing them. In practical, day to day programming, you will not likely need to use drawing objects. It would have been nice to not use these objects to illustrate the concepts being presented. Some of the objects at the end of the book seemed very complex...there seemed to be lack of clarity about getting a stream and assigning a stream etc. when demonstrating usage of ado.net.

Any objects used by the author should have been first introduced, and explained to the reader, in detail. The author did not do this. Still, just typing all the code and going through the exercizes, I did learn "alot" -- well, you know how the computer field is, "alot" is a relative term; there's so much more to learn than this to prepare for the .net world. I recommend Murach's vb.net database programming with ado.net. Haven't read it yet, but it seems to have excellent reviews and covers just about everything that you will need to know as a vb.net/asp web developer...

Well the book isn't bad at all, the code samples aren't explained enought, some OOP basics are there but I would recommend other readings. For sure this isn't a book for beginners, you must have some background in OOP programming to get it. Mainly the Interface chapters, very confusing.