Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 in 21 Days (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I found this book to be a superbly written manual for learning Visual Basic and as a reference. The language is very clear and easy to understand. Chapters are well structured, making it easy to skip and search through the book if you forget something. Most important, this book is quite comprehensive and has writing on nearly everything you will encounter in the Visual Basic syntax.

In addition, the later chapters focus on some features that most VB books dare not explore. These features include detailed tutorials to databases, web applications and custom user controls. Those later chapters have come in handy and have made this book an all-in-one reference. It eliminated the need for other specialized books, such as an introduction to ASP.NET. Not only does this book teach Visual Basic, but it is an excellent all around reference for the entire .NET platform.

Novice programmers may find this book too straightforward and boring to read. If you can be easily confused with programming, or prefer to learn at a more humorous and relaxing environment, then I recommend one of the "Visual Basic for Dummies" books. If you already have some experience writing software and are interested in getting to the hardcore Visual Basic right away, then "Sam's Teach Yourself Visual Basic .NET 2003" is an excellent choice.

Are you new to programming? If yes, then Visual Basic is a great place to start. This book, however, is not. The first day introduces you to the Integrated Development Environment. From that point forward, it's all about the code. This is a good book for slightly more advanced programmers instead of newbies, but I feel the title is very miss leading. If you are new to programming and want to lean Visual Basic.Net 2003, try Microsoft Visual Basic .Net Step by Step written by Michael Halvorson (ISBN 0735619050). It is a much better place to start for the true beginner.

After you have gone through the step-by-step book, come back to this one. It really is a good book. (Score should have been a 4 not a 1.)

I teach an introductory programming class in college and will be looking for a more introductory book. Those things that are essential to programming, a class-worth of learning, are taught in ONE DAY of the 21 days. That one day became 1 1/2 month. I also think the order of the days could be better: Simple subjects should come sooner than more complex ones.

Now for you techies here is what I am saying: Control Structures such as if/then, loops, arrays, and such are taught in one chapter. Then functions and subroutines and classes in the next. If this is your speed, go for it!

In short this is for either experienced or enthusiastic programmers. Those programmers could finish a day in one whole 8 hour day. But if you are a beginner don't start here.

I've just recently completed this book and wanted to share a few key points about what I liked and didn't like about these 950+ pages.

First the bad news (Didn't likes):
- diagrams, figures, charts were really small and hard to read
- some tables were too detailed and simply re-iterated the kind of things you could find in the documentation of help files or on the internet (the book is filled with this stuff!)
- examples were adequate but... the text made it clear "How" to use the code concepts but in a lot of cases I was asking "Why" would one do it this way?

The Likes:
- Language - good style, clear and easy to read and understand
- Good basic explanations of all concepts
- Excellent introduction to Object Oriented Programming concepts
- In my opinion this was probably the best book to start learning this language with - it covers a great deal of language specific concepts (for VB.NET)

Other notes:
- I was looking for a book to help me understand VB better
- I am studying for the first MCAD exam and needed a re-introduction to VB concepts (and .NET primer!) before tackling more advanced material - this book was just right (thus the 4 stars)
- To get an advanced understanding of VB.NET you will need more material to complement this great book.

chapter on OOP is great for beginners.
most comprehensive vb.net book that i have read.
...and this is book #12 in my collection.

I threw out 4 or 5 other books before I bought this one. It is very well presented as a basic reference. FYI I am certified in VB6 and have been to a 40 hour vb.net class and still found this to be a very good book. The samples work and they give you a wide variety of code. I see there is another book by Sams with the exact title as this ??? Wasup with that?

I won't give this book 1 star simply because there is an error in it. At that rate all the books would only get a star. No, this book teaches the exciting new language Visual Basic.Net and does a good job of it. After 21 days you will not be an expert programmer (it takes more than 21 days to become an expert in any field), but you will have a solid foundation to build on. You will have covered all the basics, and better yet will have an ideah on finding solutions to your problems.

It's a good book, but yes as many have said its got lots of errors. Most computer books have lots of errors.

I wish the book would have a website with the solutions to end of chapter applications and other goodies, but it does not come with anything other than the source code for the book.

Anyway, I use this book for one of my classes: http://iws2.ccccd.edu/bbenavides/ITSE2349_Holzner/Advanced.htm

In the end, I would say its one of the best vb .net books I have read.

I went into the store & sat for a couple hours reading a stack of vb.net books & trying to decide which one to get and this was the one. The writing style is a good mix between narative and reference, providing help where needed and reference where chatter would be no additional help.

The style starts out with a simple program, and introduces basic windows forms controls for a few days in a style that starts with the simple ones & moves on to the more complex ones.

It has some decent coverage of basic oop concepts, but is not the authority on the subject, or imo, sufficient for somebody who has never programmed before. Fortunateley the learn as you go way the book is set up will show you some practical application of how objects work (like the example of drawing new ui objects using a rectangle object to hold the dimensions)

The style after several days of reading became dry and I stopped reading. I recognized the basic pattern of the book at that point & the basic methodology of how the vb components were implemented in the language. By the time the book got dry, I recognized how it can be used as a reference in a concise and efficient way; really a best of both worlds situation. After things click for you, you don't need to finish reading the whole 900 pages or so of information in the book, and can go on to use it as a reference for basic program construction tasks (especially ui components).

I havent hit the chapters on asp programming with vb.net, so i can't comment on their quality. I have no interest in that topic, but i can see how it would be valueable. Instead of those chapters, i would rather see a case study program. After all, by the end of the book, you really don't have a whole picture of how to build an app beginning to end (and with save settings hint hint), only the pieces of how to do it & you're left to figure out how to put them together.

The book does gloss over a lot of other topics to make you aware of them & show some basic implementations (mulithreading, creating user controls) with a decent degree of effectiveness, but no depth (which is to be expected in a beginners book).

I now have several books on the topic and i'm using this one as a reference to form controls and how to interact with them most. It is one of a few books you will need on the subject. I firmly believe that there is no ONE book that covers every subject on this topic (and there shouldn't be, its a big topic).

I'm referring to the mspress vb.net cookbook most for finding system programming solutions (dealing with file system and string parsing). When i first bought it, i thought it was a weak collection of trivial stuff, but i'm using it pretty often.

As far as learning the language components, i'd reccommend any of the oop with vb.net books that are out there (i like the o'rieley ones).

This is a great first book to buy on the subject though, as it covers all the bases a little.

p.s. This is the first Sams teach yourself book that has been good to me. The other 6 i've had have all been without much value. They need to take this author on for more books.

I bought some books of .NET, including this one, and for many things this is the best one. This is a book to programming from 0. It includes referenceses, sintaxis, good examples, etc. Really I recommend it.