Customer Reviews

Object Oriented Programming in VB.Net

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

 

 

Alistair McMonnies's website sucks:

http://cis.paisley.ac.uk/mcmo-ci0/

But this book is simply excellent! Alistair explains OOP in VB.net better than any other book I've ever read. Everything seems so simple when Alistair explains. I guess this is because he is "teaching" this stuff for a living. The authors of other books (I've purchased more than 25 books) "do" this for a living and therefore cannot explain well. They are so into the stuff (OOP) that they cannot perceive that the reader may not know what they are talking about.

The core of programming in .NET is centered on OOP. And this is the best book to learn .NET!

Thanks Alistair! You should go around the world presenting Seminars! You would be a success!

I strongly disagree with the previous reader. This book was an easy read, one of the books I've read from cover to cover. I've had some difficulty finding an introductory book on .net object oriented methodologies, and fortunately I found this gem. Nevermind those small typos,the main thing is you get to learn and dig how classes and objects work in VB. If you have background in Java like me, this will be a breeze, but nevertheless, Alistair has that teaching method that will make you really interested on the topic and you will read more and more until you finish this great book. Highly recommended to all beginners in vb.net oop!

Of some use for learning OOP, but an amazing amount of errors in both the text and code examples. Perhaps the teaching method Mr. McMonnies employs is to present code with errors and have the student discover the errors, but the code is presented as working code and the student has no reason to suspect that there are errors - in fact a good 50% of the code examples do in fact work, so it is terribly inconsistent.

From what I can make of Mr. McMonnies website, this text originated from the materials for a course he teaches. The materials were evidently compiled from several different versions, an unedited hodgepodge of which went into this text.

Errors I've found:

Chapter 1: Euclid's Algorithm is stated incorrectly - step 4 should be "Let n = remainder" not "Let n = quotient"

Chapter 3: Activity 5 builds on Activities 1-4, but starts using variables that were never declared. It seems obvious that pre-publication version of Activity 3 declared the variables but they were later omitted to simplify the example. The problem is they were left in the publication version of activity 5. An obvious and easy enough to deal with error, but shows the lack of care taken in preparing book for publication.

Chapter 4: Listing 4.13 attempts to use variable "mvarBalance", but variable was never declared. A variable named "Balance" is declared and used elsewhere. Also declares a "CurrentBalance" property that is never used and uses a "GetBalance" property that is never declared.

Chapter 5: Solution to Exercise 5.4 does not work. The for loop used to calculate a factorial is wrong both logically and syntactically.

Chapter 7: Listing 7.7 demonstrates the use of access specifiers in inherited classes. In this listing a Parent class is defined with variable "MyString" declared as private. A child class is then defined with a constructor that attempts to change MyString - which it of course cannot see, but the listing presents it as though it could.

Perhaps I would be somewhat more forgiving of the errors if, on his website, Mr. McMonnies had not said in a review of another book "I did find a couple of annoying errors in it (the same topics in my own book use properly working code)".