Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

...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....

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.

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.

I'm taking a class from the author this semester - thus my anonymity (hey, I still want a chance at a 4.0!). Mike Ekedahl is a very knowledgable resource and an excellent teacher. You wouldn't know it from reading this book though. The book is incredibly hard to understand. It's one of those books where you can read the same sentence 10 times and still not have a clue what you just read. Instead of breaking the new terminology into easier-to-understand material, the chapters use previously undefined terminology to define the new terminology making for a very difficult read. I found the MSDN library to be far more help than this book.

This book was just used to fill space on the class text book requirements as my professor never used it and after reading through it, I perfectly comprehend. This book is the worst of the worst with bad explanations and examples. When you are dealing with programming you need to learn the basics in a clear way, but this book will make it so hard for you to see clearly that you will feel as if it is throwing mud in your "programming" eyes! Not recommended.

Ekedahls books are not good books to learn programming. They are books that teach how to type code in the code windows and run and "Look how well I can tell you to write a program". Unfortunately you do not learn how to prorgam. You are lost and confused and looking at your classmate asking if they understand the class.

For a beginner's book get Diane Zak's, It will save u time and money, stress, anger and hatred towards him.

I found this book very difficult to use and overly complex for beginner VB.NET programmers. I have been using this book for a class at a local college for about 8 weeks now and have resorted to using other books to help me with my assignments.

The things I disliked the most:

1) The book was not designed with ease of use and easy reading in mind. The majority of the book is run-on text. Code samples require more searching to find.

2) Each chapter should have one complete program to learn from. It is far easier to learn how to program when a book includes the code for an entire program that has been presented through walk-throughs in the chapters.

Things I liked about the book:

1) The authors did show several coding methods to use to accomplish the same task.

Overall though, Neither I, nor my classmates, liked the book. If you are an instructor thinking of selecting this book for your class, don't. Consider the book "Programming in Visual Basic .NET" by Julia Case Bradley and Anita C. Millspaugh instead. It offers everything this book doesn't.

It's funny how perspectives from a programmer and a beginner differ so greatly on this text. I am a very successful 30 something student at a major university. I think I am qualified to say, from a beginner's standpoint, that this book leaves much to be desired. I will retread some of the same points others have made here.

The book is intentionally vague: As beginners, students need to grasp basic programming concepys and styles. This text seems to often avoid explaining these basic concepts. The text also does not offer examples of good efficient code or practices. The teacher materials (assignments) intentionally ask for things not discussed in the chapters, The exams are designed to trick the student rather than test understanding of concepts. Forcing sheer memorization over understanding is a bad way to start learning. Example: Which of the following are properties of the Color Structure? a. R,G,B / b. ColorRed,ColorBlue,ColorRed / c. Alpha / d. All of the above - if you answered A you are correct -but Alpha is also a property of the color structure. That's not inportant. A is the answer.

Examples sometimes don't work: Code examples in Chapter 6 fail to work. What's worse, the publisher's web site does not correct this issue. If you plan on drawing text onto a form prepare to do some reading on the outside in order to accomplish this task.

Not easy to read: As mentioned, this text is full of run on sentenses, disjointed and technical. Technical is good, but some plain english explanations would help the BEGINNER to grasp concepts.

Class revolt over the text: As mentioned, students in my class have openly criticized this text. (They actually begged the teacher to just code in VB and explain what's happening over usung the text) These complaints were brought to not only to the teacher, but to the head of the department.

If you are teacher and want to teach VB to beginners, look at some of the other suggestions posted here. This text makes learning VB a chore. People want to be challenged, but also have fun learning something as powerful and simple as VB.NET.

I thought the book was very helpful. Each chapter has a tutorial that takes you step by step to learn the material. It lists out all the relevant properties of controls and lets you know what each one does. The book explains a lot and uses pictures and screen shots to help. Yes, some of it is hard to understand, but almost every programming book has an element of this as it is not an easy task to learn a new language and it's not easy to explain it well through text alone. I wish the book would have covered more ASP.NET(only one chapter) and more on crystal reports. If you are just starting out this is a GREAT book. Even if you don't totally understand what the author is saying, you can still easily follow the tutorial step by step and will pick it up. I think books that uses tutorials are much easier to work with. If your confused there's always an easy to learn example.

I have to say I agree with the reviews below that state that this book is not for beginners. Others have already pointed out the problems with this book, and I agree with them.
Don't buy it, unless you are looking for an expensive paper weight.