Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

The topics are thrown at you without much hand holding. Much more detail would be beneficial on some of the finite areas. I would rather some topics get a whole chapter, instead of a page or two. Other books from this same publisher (By Diane Zak in particular) are absolutely wonderful. Overall, just be ready to reread the material from this book several times to fully grasp it. That said, it will teach you how to fully interact with data and controls.

This book actually comes in two flavors: the introductory version which is being reviewed here, and a comprehensive version which I have not yet seen. I personally believe this book is a little "too" introductory in nature and focuses more on learning Visual Basic in general and less on the object-oriented aspects of the language. There are many fine volumes available that teach programming, and another such book is really not needed; however, good books on object-oriented programming are not as easily found and are certainly welcome. The author does allude to object oriented programming by his use of the word "instance" when discussing text boxes, etc., but the idea stalls rapidly since classes are mentioned without any real details. The text then goes on to discuss typical programming functions. I have a suspicion that the comprehensive version is much more geared towards objects. I recently ordered the comprehensive version and will give a review of it after I have looked it over.

Why am I giving the disk 5 stars? It contains the full Visual Studio 2002 (it's time-limited but that doesn't matter) which comes with a tool that only studio.net came with: vb6controls.reg. This utility installs design time licenses for all the active-x controls that shipped with Visual Basic 6.0 so that you can use them without VB-6...! If you want to use mscomm32.ocx in a VB.NET program you'll have an official license to do so. Folks, this is like a gold mine and you won't find this available at this kind of price very often. For some strange profit-motivated reason Microsoft didn't include this tool on the VB.NET disk, only on the significantly higher-priced studio disk; so if you are upgrading a VB6 program you need to buy the entire studio package just to get this one tool. Now you can have it for a bargain basement price. Incidentally, the tool is NOT time-limited...! The controls themselves are not on the disk, so you'll have to get them from your VB6 media (or a computer that has VB6 installed on it).

If you're looking for a good intro to object-oriented programming you might want to skip this book; however, if you're looking for a copy of vb6controls.reg you've come to the right place. Grab it while you can since there probably aren't a lot of these disks left for sale.