Customer Reviews

Programming VB .NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Cornell has always been one of my favorite writers on programming topics and this book doesn't dissapoint. (Interestingly enough, Jesse Liberty my other favorite writer on programming, has written a great C# book.) There is no question in my mind that this book currently is by far the best place to learn VB .NET if you have any programming experience at all.

Note however that Cornell's book isn't comprehensive and it doesn't cover nearly as many topics as Wrox's "Professional VB .NET." so you might want to get a copy of that book for now.

But what Cornell covers he generally covers in a far better manner and in much more detail than the Wrox book. (As I said in a previous review I found the Wrox book too variable from chapter to chapter to be ideal.) In particular, Cornell's chapters on OOP (especially the Inheritance and Interface chapter) are among the best I have ever seen on these topics. This is also the first book on VB .NET that I have seen that really covers multi-threading in any depth and I was happy to see that the chapter on Windows Forms covers basic printing! (A pet peeve of mine...).

However, the downside to Corenll's book is that the chapters on ADO .NET and ASP .NET are only brief surveys and you pretty much have to (but you should anyway) turn to the excellent books "Teach Yourself ASP .NET in 21 Days" (Payne, Sams) and "Database Programming with VB NET" (Thomsen, Apress) for more information on these topics.

The 3 chapters on OOP (Classes and Objects, Inheritance and Interfaces, and Event Handling and Delegates) are by far the clearest I have read on the subject. That goes for both text and example code, which are working! If only for these 3 chapters, which cover 40% of the 422 usable pages, it's worth the price of the book.

Gary Cornell does state that these 3 chapters form the core of the book, and after reading this book and Dan Appleman's "Moving to VB.NET", I totally agree that developers "will find it extremely hard to take advantage of VB.NET's new powers" if they don't utilize OOP in VB.NET. Knowing, and being comfortable with, OOP makes it so much easier to develop solutions using VB.NET, and the .NET framework in general.

I thought the 2 intro chapters on VB.NET IDE and "vocabulary" were informative and not boring, and that goes for the chapter on Multithreading.

I would have liked to see a longer and more detailed treatment of Error Handling, and some "real" examples for the Windows Forms chapter.

In "About This Book", the author set 3 objectives: a complete treatment of OOP in VB.NET, fundamentals of VB.NET techniques, and differences between VB.NET and earlier versions. He has succeeded in these 3 objectives!

I will disagree though with the note on not assuming any knowledge of earlier versions of VB. Experienced VB5/6 programmers WITH some real C++ (OOP) experience will benefit the most from this book.

This book is a GUIDE for people with programming experience to using VB.NET. If you are an experienced VB developer, this book will be of GREAT use to you in converting. If you are a programming novice, the high speed approach used in this book will probably leave you unable to do much in terms of real programming. The explanations are so clear, that it may still be useful for a novice though. For people who are using other languages, and want to try their hand at VB, this is also probably very useful, especially if you know Java.

Please note that this is NOT a complete how-to, nor do the authors attempt to infer that it is. It is just a rational explanation of the core bits of VB.NET and how the language has changed from VB5/VB6. In particular, their breakdown of the new totally OOP approach of VB is very good, although it may bore you a bit if you have a solid understanding of Java. In an hour with this book, I knew more about the new features/changes in VB than I did with two days of studying the docs from Microsoft.

I was looking forward to upgrading a few small applications that I've written in previous versions of VB to VB.NET, but wasn't sure exactly where to start. This book formed an excellent basis. Even if you've only had a little bit of experience with VB, you should find it to be an invaluable resource for learning the ins and outs of OO programming and VB.NET's implementation. The book provides very through coverage of most of the important concepts that real-world developers will need. It does move quickly through most topics (perhaps the reason for the "A Guide for Experienced Programmers"), but I found the pace to be perfect for me (although I'll be re-reading some sections soon). In fact, the only portion of the book that I found to be lacking was coverage of database access using ADO.NET. The book does provide a brief chapter on teh topic, but refers the reader to the documentation for more details. A little extra coverage here (especially since dealing with data sources is such an important topic for real-world developers) would have been helpful.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to get an great basis of knowledge for working with VB.NET. Good luck!

I bought this book and several others to prepare myself for the transition from VB6 to VB.NET. I wish they would have covered the disconnected datasets, ADO.NET and ASP.NET in more detail. I would have given it 5 stars if it had.

Other than that, I feel that it is an excellent resource to prepare a programmer from any background for VS.NET. It does a good job of covering the OOP, Inheritance, Overloading, and multithreading subjects in a concise manner.

The book also has a web site for errata and source code. Gary Cornell is a good author and it shows in this book he co-authored.

I have a few Wrox Publishing Books, but my library is starting to collect more an more APRESS books because their style and format is what I expect from a book.

Wrox does publish some good books also:
I would also recommend .NET Enterprise Development in VB.NET from Design to Deployment, ISBN 1861006179, (Wrox Publishers)

I teach programming topics, VB in particular. I have probably ten books on VB.NET and I needed to choose which would be a good one to use to use to teach a class. After reading all of these books, I have found this is the best one to learn from so far. The book is easy to understand for us VB people who need to get up and running with VB.NET as soon as possible. It's the one to get.

This is a good introduction to VB .NET, but I think some better, more detailed books have been published after this one. This book has many minor errors. Gary Cornell posted several dozen corrections on the Apress web site, but I'm sure I found just as many errors that have not yet been corrected. Most of the errors are just typos, so I guess that shouldn't keep you from buying the book. However, I think Apress should try to improve their editing.

More importantly, nearly all of the example code in the book is of the "Hello, World!" caliber. The code demonstrates the concepts ok, but generally is of little use in a real-world application. For instance, I don't think I'll ever have need for the Knife and Fork classes or the Programmer.Eat method, but I could be wrong. I've also found little demand for foo and bar classes in my part of the country, but maybe we're special. I think you could find another book with much more code that could actually be reused.

Also, the book does not come with a CD. You can download the code from Apress, but there is no electronic version of the book available for searching. If you're looking for a VB .NET reference to use over and over, I think you should find one that includes an electronic version you can quickly search.

Finally, the final chapters of the book are extremely short and cursory, hardly more than long magazine articles really, barely covering important topics like database access, ASP .NET, and COM interop. If these topics are important to you, this book is not the one for you.

I bought this book in January, but if I were shopping for a VB .NET book now I'd be looking at these authors: Francesco Balena, Andrew Troelsen, John Connell, or Mike Snell.

I have most of the VB NET books out there and I agree with the reviewers who say that Cornell's is the best one for learning inheritance and interfaces. He also has the clearest treament of delegates and events that I have seen. I don't know how anybody could give this book only one or two stars. It is a great, great book.

It does exactly what it says it wants to do: teach you the object oriented foundations of programming in VB .NET. It's not a book with much on ADO .NET or ASP .NET but they make it clear that that is not their aim.

I am an intermediate VB6 programmer. I truelly enjoyed this book. It did not cover everything but what it did cover, it did a good job. The only concept I had problems with is Delegates. I thought the example used in that section was a little difficult.

The section on printing was covered half-harzardly. I would have liked a better job in this section.

I'll still recommend this book to anyone who needs basic knowledge on OOP programming.

This is a pretty-good book if you base it on the Beta. The chapters on OOP (Chapters 4 - Classes and Objects and 5 - Inheritance and Interfaces) are very long. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 (Event Handling and Delegates)form the heart of this book, but I would have broken them down into smaller chapters. The information in those chapters provide a good introduction to OOP. At times, I felt the authors were hard to follow and found myself re-reading several pages especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall this book probably is about 3 1/2 stars. I am hoping that in the next release of this book that the authors would follow their own advice and break the chapters down into smaller parts. ...