Customer Reviews

Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There haven't been many good books that take Visual Basic .NET seriously as a full-featured Object Oriented Programming language for the .NET platform. Every other book on VB .NET is nothing but screenshot after screenshot of "drag-and-drop" development using Visual Studio.

Programming with the .NET framework encompasses a huge spectrum of things to learn. VB .NET the language, Visual Studio IDE, ASP .NET , ADO .NET, Windows Forms, Windows Services, Serviced Components and Interop are some of those things. After trying many VB books out there, I can confidently say that covering the entire breadth of topics makes a book shallow.

This book picks a select few of the above-mentioned topics and drills very deep into them. It focuses on the language constructs and shows us better programming techniques. Going through a few chapters, I've already learned many ways to write better code.

I'm glad this book doesn't spend a few hundred pages on ADO.NET and ASP.NET (there are some very good books that cover those topics... see below). Doing so would have taken space away from the valuable (and rare) content on the language itself.

This book won't show you how to create a drag-and-drop Windows/Web app. What it will do is make you a much better programmer.

Here's a list of some of the best books for VB Developers currently for sale:

- For Database Programming: Pro ADO.NET 2.0 (Sahil Malik; Apress)

- For ASP.NET Web Development: Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference (Dino Esposito; MS Press)

- Best-practices for .NET: Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C# Developers (Francesco Balena, Giuseppe Dimauro; MS Press)

- Good overall crash-course to get things started: Programming Visual Basic 2005 (Jesse Liberty; O'Reilly)

And of course, to master the most fundamental thing of all, the language itself, I recommend this book.

I am writing a "review" of my own book to ensure that potential buyers know exactly what the book contains, how it is structured, and why.

First and foremost, this book does **NOT** cover all the topics that its 2002 and 2003 editions do. Most notably, it doesn't cover Windows Forms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, plus other advanced topics such as serviced components, and security.

The point is, there are so many new things in the .NET Framework 2.0 and a single book can't cover them with the necessary level of detail. If I had squeezed all these topics in a 1400-page book (which is the largest book my publisher would allow me to write), the result wouldn't be satisfactory anyway. If you are interested in these high-level topics, you should purchase a book with a narrower focus, for example the excellent "Programming ASP.NET" by Dino Esposito.

After a lot of hard thinking, I decided to focus solely on important topics that, in my opinion, very few books cover adequately, namely the Visual Basic 2005 language and the most important base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0: basic data types, arrays and collections, resources, files and streams, object serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop.

After I took the decision, I had to face the problem of choosing the best title for the new edition. Some portions of this book are taken from its previous editions, therefore the title should have been close enough to make the relation clear. At the same time, the title should have been different enough to emphasize that it isn't a new edition the **same** book. In the end, I opted for appending "The Language" to the original title, hoping that this difference was apparent enough as to have readers of previous edition look more closely at its Table of Contents and understand that some chapters were missing.

The new edition covers in all the new features of the language a very detailed manner, including generics, the My Namespace, unsigned integers, partial classes, operator overloading, and custom events.

But this book is more than just a reference book; rather, it is about **programming techniques** that you can implement with Visual Basic 2005 and base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0. For example, I devote an entire chapter to explain how reflection can be useful to solve recurring programming problems in a very elegant manner, whereas another chapter describes how you can custom attributes to implement plug-ins for Windows Forms application and n-tier, data-centric applications. The chapter on regular expressions shows how you can use this under-utilized .NET feature to parse html files, read comma-delimited and fixed-length data files, perform quite sophisticated input data validation, and more.

Finally, it makes little sense to focus on the language and know nothing about the IDE, and for this reason the book devotes over 110 pages to improving productivity by means of the old and new features of Visual Studio, such as macros, code snippets, tracepoints, unit testing, code coverage, code analysis, and more.

You can read more about this book, including the complete Table of Contents and a couple sample chapters, on my blog hosted by the dotnet2themax web site.

I have had Balena's book since Visual Basic 6.0, then his Programming Visual Basic.NET, then I got his 2003 edition of the book.

I really like the fact that he separated the important topic of "The Language" as he did it this time. You can find books on ADO.NET elsewhere and that's how it should be because these topics can be quite vast in itself. So I find the approach he took is more helpful.

The improved platform of Visual Studio is remarkable in my opinion and it seems I can get more done now with less code than ever before on some features.

A quick note:
When I first started reading Balena's first book on .NET, I was completely lost. And he even suggested it was not for "beginners", but if you persevere, you will slowly begin to comprehend what .NET is all about. It takes time..But as you learn the concepts, Balena's books becomes all the more clear. So hang in there...And if you are searching for help in understanding what .NET is about, you have certainly come to the right book.

Hope this review helps -

I read other reviews before purchasing this book. I understood that it was only a language reference, however I was still unprepared for how much VB.Net programming was not specifically related to the language.

For example, this book does NOT contain:
- Any information about data binding or data access
- Any instruction on using or extending Windows or Web forms
- Any ADO.Net or ASP.Net instruction

You must understand these topics to code any VB.Net application, and this book will not help. I heard this book was a second edition to Programming Visual Basic .Net by the same author (which has broad and deep coverage of VB.Net 2003) but that simply can't be the case.

Balena has written a very specialized book, which covers some advanced topics well, such as:
- OOP concepts, including inheritance and delegates
- Generics
- Regular Expressions
- Reflection
- Multi-threading

Good book, but only for coverage of advanced VB.Net 2005 language-specific topics.

This book is outstanding for what it covers. It's a great reference for some core topics, as well as for techniques most programmers may never use, but just might. If you ever happen to need to use reflection or multithreading, for example, look no further than this book for a thorough explanation.

The author's style is elegant, though at times a bit too concise. Many sections I had to read over three or four times to really understand the material (e.g., the chapter on regular expressions). On the plus side, there were remarkably few typos, and practically all the code samples worked. The book clearly was written in an admirably painstaking, workmanlike fashion one could only wish for in a great many technical tomes.

The presentation was dry, typical of a "reference" work. It is better suited to looking up what you need for a particular project, rather than for reading cover to cover. I did read it cover to cover, however, because the book is practically a blueprint for the MCTS exam. I had to keep waking myself up to get through the advanced topics.

The main problem with this book is what it *doesn't* cover. As others have noted, there is nothing on ADO.NET nor ASP.NET. In addition there is nothing on XML, nothing on Windows forms and their component controls; I could go on. My point is, how can this be a core reference? Sure, you can get coverage of these topics in other books, but what if your budget is limited to one book? It would be nice if a "core" reference had at least some coverage of every core topic.

I intended to give this book 4 stars, but Amazon wouldn't let me edit my original selection of 3.

I have read through a few best selling VB.NET books and I believe this is the best book on the topic. The best part about this book is that it does not give the rehashed technical manual feeling that most other books would give you. Instead, you can tell the author had been planning to write this book for a while and he added many fine details about VB.NET and Framework which might have been puzzling you. However this book only comvers the core topics and there are some other fine details which are missed, so I recommend you reading together with Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer). That book gives you the rehashed feeling, though.

As usual , Mr. Balena's books are piece of art, this one is no difference , super writing style , very well organized , excellent code snippets , I just wish there was a 100 pages chapter on ADO.NET 2.0 new features, anyway I found Glenn Johnson's Programming ADO.NET 2.0 a very well substitute for that topic missing here.

The things I like about this book are that the topics it covers are very well done. It covers some of the trickier aspects like threading and regular expressions. Being an experienced programmer I like the fact that you can jump around in the book to just the aspects of the language that you are interested. I will warn the novice programmer that this is probably not a good starter book, but if you are ready for the material you will find that it has a good balance of code examples, and explanation.

There are just a few spots in the code example where I can see a slightly better implementation, but if you are an experienced programmer this will not be difficult at all to see yourself.

Last but not least, the appendix is one of the beefiest one's I have seen in ANY programming book. If there is anything I hate about tech books is a lousy appendix and this one is top notch.

I based my purchase of this book on the reviews on it, and I must say that they were accurate. This book is an exceptionally good means for an experienced programmer to learn how to program in Visual Basic 2005. Assuming one already is familiar with typical program mechanisms and mindsets, this book allows you to immediately become effective without wasting time discussing elementary concepts.

I should also add that the writing of the book is pleasant, the proofing very well done, and the overall appearance is quite nice. There aren't many books that get 5 stars but this is one.

Visual Basic appeared more than 15 years ago as a tool to define quick prototypes and develop GUI applications with ease. Its development environment, which the language was literally blended in, was remarkably easy to use. I remember those good old days when a fellow colleague of mine showed me how to draw VB forms and in less than an hour after I was already developing a new GUI application.

Visual Basic has gone through a long way since then. The language is nowadays a powerful, complex, potent medium to develop sophisticated applications. In fact, Visual Basic.NET is virtually on par with C#.

"Visual Basic 2005: The Language" by Francesco Balena tries to show - in a gentle yet dense manner - the long way that VB has pursued over the years and well as the current state of affairs. It succeeds on both counts.

The book is divided in four bigs parts:
1) The Basics - which introduces the reader to what Visual Basic.NET is all about, with explicit references to the differences between VB6 and VB.NET (very useful for VB6 programmers).
2) Object Oriented Programming - which presents the OOP support in VB.NET. This section is important because VB.NET departs from the old OOP support and gets more in line with the .NET paradigm.
3) Working with the .NET Framework - which may be seen as a natural continuation of the previous part in the context of the .NET framework.
4) Advanced Topics - which tackles how advanced .NET elements (like attributes) get handled in VB.NET as well as what VB.NET is still better than, say, C# (namely the interop with COM and Automation).

The book is truly monumental in form and dense in content. The style is slightly verbose but this adds value: you cannot skip pages without losing valuable information and in such conditions reading a book of this size is quite a task.

As an added bonus, the author presents several mini-projects that are in fact mini how-to tutorials: how to build a plug-in for WinForms, how to develop a n-tier application. Without the generosity of Mr. Balena you'd have to buy an extra book for an introduction in such useful stuff.

"Visual Basic 2005" has several minor drawbacks, though:
1) The remarks showing the differences between VB6 and VB.NET are scattered throughout the text. For a VB6 programmer this is difficult to follow and for a non-VB6 programmer this is slightly annoying. Perhaps Mr. Balena should have dedicated a special chapter to those differences and then forget about them.
2) The book does not say much about all the other .NET languages, as if VB.NET is the only .NET language under the sun. In fact, .NET diminishes the differences between languages without making them identical. This is not apparent from this book.
3) The book does not say enough about what is specific to Visual Basic, besides syntax. Why would anyone want to program in Visual Basic.NET when you have C#? In my opinion, Visual Basic.NET is not going to go away any time soon especially because it retains those qualities of VB6 - a verbose and intuitive syntax, a loose typing system (perfect fit for Automation interop) as well as a slightly better exception catching mechanism. In my opinion, "Visual Basic 2005" does not elaborate enough on such necessary topics.

Overall, the book is a must if you want to come up to speed with the Visual Basic language after years of programming in other languages. However, if you want to learn Visual Basic from scratch or if you want to use Visual Basic.NET for more "mundane" tasks - such as building WinForm applications - then this book is not for you.