Customer Reviews

Professional VB 2005 (Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

This publication has not been subject to technical editing, or if it has, the staff performing the edit were definitely unqualified. The book contains literally dozens of errors, most of which should have been caught before publication. In many cases the text refers to a figure the contents of which bear no relation to the text. As an experienced VB.NET developer I was able to resolve most of the amomalies but anyone attempting to use this book as a migration aid from VB6 to VB.NET would really struggle. When I emailed the publisher (WROX) they displayed a distinct lack of interest, suggesting I compile a list of errors and send it to them and they would, if they agreed, add them to the errata on their website.

I assumed I would like this book a lot, as I've enjoyed books and articles by many of the authors. Perhaps part of the problem is too many authors - and no primary editor (or one with too many projects.)

Some of the sections are strong, but many key concepts are not mentioned at all. I'll focus on data access as an example.

I realize any book on VB quickly becomes huge, and this one comes with 1000+ pages. But that's 1,066 pages with no mention of TableAdapters, a key new data access object in .NET 2.0. Perhaps the author of the section believes that use of a DataAdapter is always a better choice; if so, TableAdapter weaknesses should be described so that readers are aware of them. Microsoft believes the object is so fundamental that it is the first topic described on MSDN - after "Getting Started with Data Access" and before "Connecting to Data in Visual Studio." I don't understand why this new object, which is used to fill datasets and datatables, is not mentioned in a section titled "ADO.NET 2.0 enhancements to the DataSet and DataTable".

All aspects of data access, a fundamental part of almost any application, are covered in 48 pages. Twenty of those pages comprise a section "Building a Data Access Component" that includes many errors. None of the errors reported to the publisher two months ago are yet included in the errata.

In a related area, I could find no mention of the new BindingSource class or BindingSource component, key new features to support Windows Forms data binding.

This may have been one of the first books released on VB 2005, but whatever your level of experience, it's certainly not the best.

This book gets down into the guts of VB 2005 and gives you an up close view of the inner workings of the .NET platform focusing specifically on VB. Every detail is covered.

For the most part, real world scenarios are not given in this book. The authors prefer to keep it generic and will tend to focus on the mechanics of the language.

This book is definitely for higher level programmers who do not yet know VB very well. Beginners will get lost quickly.

This book is not for the casual reader. This is a college style textbook that requires your full attention, and portions of it need to be read more than once.

Overall, when you finish, you will have an in depth knowledge of VB 2005.

This book could probably be used by the beginning VB programmer if they are at least familar with the basic concepts of programming. But it is really intended for those who have used VB before. This book concentrates on the changes in VB 2005 with special regard for its integration as part of the .NET environment. The book uses Visual Studio 2005, the integrated development environment that makes the writing of VB programs much easier.

The big changes in VB 2005 and the .NET environment is that most tasks take far less code to implement. This combined with the leap to VB becoming an object-oriented language has extended its ability to be used to code more extensive enterprise applications.

Shipping as part of Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft includes ASP.NET which is also covered here as part of the use of VB in programming for web sites. Other web oriented subjects included here include an introduction to XML which is used with the web to facilitate machine to machine communications. This is changing the very concept of the web where the data the site displays to a user may come from other machines literally anywhere in the world.

At almost 1200 pages, there's a lot of material here. It's well written, and covers just about everything you'd want to know about VB. I found a few small errors, but no real problems.