Customer Reviews

Programming Visual Basic 2008: Build .NET 3.5 Applications with Microsoft's RAD Tool for Business

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

 

 

This would be a great book, but for two things . . . 1. The worst was, I got to page 332, then realized that the next page was 359! I want my missing 27 pages! 2. The author's attempts at humor are just plain lame, because they distract from the content. You are in the middle of reading a sentence, and within that content, he throws in some off-the-wall comment . . . it was irritating, when you are trying to follow the flow of information. That said, there is some pretty good information in the book, otherwise, I would have considered it trash.

I don't feel this is a book for beginners, chapters 2-7 were easy to grasp, but after that it definitely gets complex. I would recommend the book for someone who already read a VB2008 intro book with at least some light OOP and wants to get some ideas for his or her own applications. For the solo developer I think the book is priceless.

One reviewer stated the snippets that are installed in visual studio for quick pasting of code was a bad thing but I found it it to be amazing. If you feel compelled to rewrite the code by hand, you could easily do so, but memorizing code is not the purpose of the book as it might be in a beginners book. The book also comes with a visual studio template project for each chapter, one for "before code" and one for "after code". The author explains where to paste the snippets in the "before code" templates per chapter while explaining what each snippet of code does. If you get stuck, just look at the "after code" template and run it/debug/step through it.

This method was very convenient/original and took away a lot of the tediousness of positioning every little label and button for all the forms and creating repetitive code. This allowed me to quickly understand why the author built the app the way he did and how the code worked.

I thought it was great until Chapter 8 "Classes and Inheritance" which is where I'm at now. This chapter seems overly complex and I question the need for it. There must be easier and clearer ways of accomplishing the goals. It certainly not straight forward. This Chapter is convoluted.

Thought this was a well written book for the beginner, at least it appears to be a primer for beginners. Easy read and to be honest i thought the exercises at the end of each chapter was good but more examples could be created to illustrate key concepts introduced in each chapter.

Not quiet as fun to read as Liberty's work on the subject, but I think I learned more from Patrick's book.

If you are just getting into VB, this will help.

OK, I'll try to be concise. I have experience in C++ and VBA but needed a deeper understanding to further my career as a controls engineer.

This book is good for teaching some basics in a strict didactic format. It is also good for starting fires -- it's made of paper.

Now, on to the rest. If you are hoping for a guided tour of PROGRAMMING, get a different book. There is a project that the author goes through step-by-step within this book (interesting but not useful in my opinion), but you won't do ANY of the actual programming. The code is contained in snippets that you will inert into the already created templates. Not really useful. It would have been much more useful to have the reader do the actual coding of the project and make the project less complex. Perhaps this book is geared for the much more advanced user, though it is not touted as such. The project is geared towards business applications which might be useful for some, but I needed to learn to write the actual code -- again, you won't write ANY for the "project" in this book unless you have an already extensive grasp of VB.

This book is an easy read and did not put me to sleep as other texts have done. The text is engaging with some weak attempts at humor. It also covers a great swath of VB commands and syntax at a decent pace; however, again, you won't be USING this new knowledge on any examples from the book. If you are completely new to VB, do not get this book, you will be disappointed. If you are intermediate to advanced, some of the advanced techniques that are used can be employed in code you might already be working on.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone as I found it to be useless in TEACHING VB. As a reference, maybe, but I learn from doing, not from reading.

I expected it to be a better book but was disappointed by not covering certain subjects thoroughly

Programming Visual Basic 2008 has been and continues to be very thorough and helpful.. well worth the money.