Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET: An Object-Oriented Approach- Comprehensive [Paperback]

Michael Ekedahl (Author), William Newman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2002

This text is designed for a comprehensive Visual Basic course for students with little programming background. Its approach is object-oriented and data-driven. It introduces programming techniques through exercises and case problems.

Product Details

• Paperback: 664 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology Ptr (Sd); Bk&CD-Rom edition (August 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0619016582
• ISBN-13: 978-0619016586
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,796,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth lining a bird cage with!!!!!, March 21, 2003

By 

Darknight07 (Lacey, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET: An Object-Oriented Approach- Comprehensive (Paperback)

...This book was required for a VB .Net programming class I took at a local College. Out of 25 people no one found the book helpful in any area of learning programming. I even talked with some friends in other VB classes that were using the same book and their classmates responses were the same as ours. By midway through the quarter the instructor had all but abandoned using the book as a reference for the class. Instead of being called comprehensive it should have been called incomprehensible!

The Author's idea of programming examples is to show just a couple lines of code instead of how the code would be used in a program. The practice exercises call for you to use the author's prewritten code (which you have to download) and alter a couple lines of code to accomplish your task. This is not programming...

Most of the subjects that were covered were presented in such a poor method that the reader is left more confused after reading the topic than before. The book was espicially bad on Printing, Collections, Classes, and Load/Save to/from a file.

When you try to recreate a program using the author's code and making changes that you are instructed to perform about a third of the time the program will fail and the book provides such poor information that you can not troubleshoot the problem....

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Avoid this book: quality control lacking, February 2, 2003

By 

Rex M. Jacobsen (Redmond, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET: An Object-Oriented Approach- Comprehensive (Paperback)

This book was used in our introductory VB.Net class. My fellow students and I were not happy with this book.

Problems with the book:

1) A programming concept is explained one way and then later used in a different way. For instance, the authors use "controlchars.crlf" to insert a carriage return/line feed. Later the author uses "crlf" to accomplish the same thing. The author fails to tell us that to do this, the programmer must
type "Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic.ControlChars" at the top of the file. Doing a task in 2 different ways without explaining the necessary steps leaves students confused, frustrated, and wary of using a Course.com book again.

2) The author's code doesn't always work properly. Chapter 7's exercise 1 is an example of this.

3) Exercises that are designed to teach a simple concept are often so overly complex that the reader doesn't learn the simple concept at all. Exercise 1 in chapter 7 is one example of this. It tries to teach how to read data from a file and then perform a mathematical calculation on the accumulated data. The data that the authors have the reader import into their program is so large that it is cumbersome for the reader to check if the program is working correctly. This exercise needed to be scaled back; instead of reading in hundreds of numbers and then averaging them, how about merely reading in 2 or 3 numbers so the beginner programmer can easily tell if his program is working correctly? Apparently the authors had trouble coding this too, since their solution did not work properly.

4) There are numerous "attention to detail" mistakes; a programming book cannot afford to have these.

5) There is no errata on their web site.

When I asked the publisher for a list of corrections for the book, they said they had none and offered to pay me to quality-check the book for them. A quality-check should have been done long before it was ever published. This book has the feel of one that was rushed out the door to be one of the first introductory VB.Net books on the market.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor textbook, there are many better., September 1, 2005

By 

HealthAdminGuy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET: An Object-Oriented Approach, Comprehensive (Paperback)

This is a poorly written book. The explanations are incomplete and the book is (badly) organized around examples, rather than conceptual building blocks. As stated in other reviews, some of the program examples do not work, and must be debugged. What really prompted me to review this text is the previous positive review from a teacher. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: when class after class of students finishes a course feeling demotivated because of a confusing text, and that they have frustrating gaps in the knowledge they should have aquired, the teacher or professor's opinion of the text is irrelevant. Apparently there are some teachers who, rather than admit that they have chosen a bad textbook, will dig-in and defend that text to the bitter end. I take great exception to the review title "Great for responsible and interested learners!" In other words, he says that students who do not find this book understandable are irresponsible and/or uninterested. On this note, perhaps we should let half of the air out of a life-ring before we throw it to a drowning person. If he or she is "responsible and interested," and tries very hard, then the person will overcome that disadvantage, and in the process, build endurance and ability to stay afloat. We are told by the reviewer that the "responsible and interested" reader will be able to "connect the dots" on his own, and make sense out of this book. Finally, the review even has the audacity to admonish teachers who might be tempted to "cater to this type of student," (students who complain about this textbook). I have tried hard not to get personal in this review (rebuttal), so I will just say in a generic mode, that any teacher or professor who intentionally sets students up for failure by using a difficult text, when other better,clearer, more understandable ones are available, should rethink his or her career. A book for teaching Visual Basic should thoroughly expound Visual Basic, and not be an obstacle course for teaching independent thinking. On that note, as you might expect, this book is utterly useless for someone learning VB on their own.