Customer Reviews

Professional VB.NET 2003, 3rd Edition

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

...spoil the soup. The combined regurgitation of 17 authors, each with their own programming style and unorthodox naming conventions makes for a very confusing book. The proofing on this book is absolutely miserable. You had better be a professional developer to get past the myriad of errata in the sample code and text.

All in all, the book does provide a decent jumping off point from which to explore the world of VB.Net. Don't expect a definitive manual, though. If you want that, read the online documentation for Visual Studio.Net. In many ways it is far superior and certainly the last word. I did read this book cover to cover and worked through all the examples. Thankfully, I was able to pick out and fix the errors in the code. A less experienced developer may become quickly frustrated with this book.

The examples are often academic and rarely provide any real-world insight into the intricacies of application development. Another frustrating point is the continued use of the phrase "...we'll explain that later in chapter 'XX'...". In some cases this phrase is used several times in one paragraph. It points to a lack of organization and planning as to how the material should have been presented. You should rightly be very suspicious about a book that was written well before the actual release of the .Net SDK. I think it would be safe to say that as a result, none of the authors have written production .Net code. And from the look of some of their examples, God help their clients.

Overall rating: disappointing. Would I buy it? Probably not. I was able to get my hands on one of several copies floating around at one of my client sites. If you have the ability to borrow it, do so and save yourself the $40. Otherwise, just skip it and read the online documentation that comes with the product.

I use to love Wrox books but they are getting sloppier and sloppier and weaker and weaker in the mad rush to be first to market. Don't get me wrong, this book isn't so much bad as just not very good. Topics that I expect to be in a professional level book (like printing) aren't there and often chapters stop just when they could have gotten to the professional level (the chapter on multithreading is a good example of this, no real discussion of deadlock or race conditions). I would actually say as a result of this the level of this book is actually beginner+ and not professional!

I do believe this could have been a great book if it had another 3 months of development behind it, and I would be willing to bet the second edition of this book will be great and Wrox will recapture it's old glory. But, as of now this book is just half baked.

(I also found the order of this book very strange, the core programming chapters on OOP are introduced in the middle?)

After reading "VB.NET For Developers" I was looking for something to take me the next step. This wasnt the book. It seamed that all of the authors did not work together to come up with a concise guide. There is a great deal of content on different topics but not meaty enough to merit the title and I felt lots of duplication (Should have expected with so many authors). My recommendation is to pick up either the "VB.NET For Developers" book or the Dan Appleman book. And wait for a true Professional VB.NET book in several months.

First, this review DOES refer to the current edition:
Professional VB.NET 2003, 3rd Edition

I have purchased many, many books published by WROX. I have found them to, for the most part, to be GREAT books with a range of information. The books are in series, so you can choose either Beginner or Professional versions.

BUT the one thing I can't understand is their total disinterest in creating a decent index. This book has the worst INDEX of all. Not only is the index very skimpy (as most of the WROX books are,) but THIS book's index is FULL of mistakes. It seems virtually every listing sends the user to the WRONG page. I just don't understand what the problem with Wrox is. This index issue of skimpiness/mistakes is found throughout their catalog of books.

NOTE: As far as content, I would have given this book FIVE stars, but someone from WROX should start addressing the INDEX issues.

If you wish to see well done indices just look at books from Microsoft Press.

Again, please understand, the content of this book is excellent.

In my opinion, I don't feel this was a very well written book. It is quite prevalent that the book was pieced together by many different authors (as the cover implies), and in the true spirit of WROX, I am somewhat disappointed. While I did like the code samples (being a visually motivated learner), the inconsistency between chapters and examples was somewhat perplexing.

As others have mentioned it is easy to see that there were 14 different authors for this book. Some chapters were good, but most were not. If you have taken out all of the redundancies the book would have been 1/3 smaller. In many cases the book introduced the concept, gave 1 example and then quit - web services and threading. I expect more from a professional level book. In fact I would say this is maybe a beginner+ book. Also, several sections were just left out such as file handling.

All in all this was a major disappointment.

This book is the sequel to "Beginning VB.NET 2003". That book of necessity had to devote time to going over basic syntactical material of VB.NET. By contrast, this book is squarely aimed at object oriented material.

It shows how to design a problem so as to have natural object classes. From these, the book moves into implementing these under VB. This of course leads immediately into topics like inheritance and interfaces. And how to make a hierarchy of classes. You get to imagine levels of abstraction, like virtual methods in a class, which act as placeholders for actual methods in derived classes. There is a good discussion of the various ways that polymorphism can arise.

Other chapters go into the GUI aspects of the language. Secondary emphasis really. These chapters are straightforward. Nothing conceptually hard here.

What is striking about the book is that in the OO chapters, if you remove the code examples, much of the text could apply to C++, Java and C#. What Microsoft has done is promote VB to the level of these languages.

Was hoping that this book would have taken further the concepts and ideas introduced by Billy Hollis & Rocky Lahotka's earlier book - not the case. Most of the stuff is a repeat or rehash of the stuff found elsewhere. No standards and consistency between authors - looks like there's as many styles as the number of authors. Poor job putting it together. A big disappointment from Wrox with another "me-too" book.

This book is not based on Visual Studio.Net Final Release!

I have read the book front to back including introduction page. I just realized that the book was based on beta 2 of Visual Studio.Net, too late for a refund. Anyway, I went on to read it and found out that the book was not very much organised as tons of '...we'll discuss this on chapter xx ... ' appear no less than 5 times in a single chapter (on some chapters). Mispelled words also are catching enough to say that this book was in a hurry to be printed.

If you're looking for a book that covers thorough details on window forms and web form control howtos, this wouldn't give you enough detail on those topics. Web Services is equally a mere introduction, with about two pages of discussion on UDDI as well as WSDL. Not much on ADO.Net and XML.

I should have borrowed this book instead and skim through it or should have bought it for 20 bucks less. Besides, it's already outdated. I hope the same authors would come up with a second edition that has richer detail...and send me a free copy.

If you are new to the .NET/VB.NET realm, then this is a good place to start. However, i have found a lot of errors (spelling as well as logical), hence the three stars.