Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic .NET in 24 Hours

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Your perspective on this book will depend on your background in VB. If you already know the language, then this book will be of no use to you.. This is a book for beginners, those who need their mouse manipulation hand held when they first see the IDE.
From that perspective, the book is minimally adequate, lacking any depth. The basics of the language are covered in a series of short exercises. Unfortunately, the emphasis is on the GUI objects available and there is very little code used in the examples. None of the programs does anything of substance, and there are few programs that involve more than one of the structures available in VB.
While the title emphasizes VB.NET, there is little in the book that is unique to the .NET iteration. Many of the exercises could easily be performed in version 6. The .NET version is the first one to be truly object-oriented, a major change, and yet very little space is devoted to the topic. Granted that it is a hard topic to understand, but given that that is now the fundamental structure of the language, it must be explained in detail.
While you can learn most of the features of VB.NET from this book, it does not cover enough of the object-oriented fundamentals that beginners need to know about the language.

This is a pleasant book (but now the wrong edition) for the beginner with no prior VB experience. Teaching is done via many VERY SIMPLE projects, and these cannot be done without Visual Studio. You want to buy the latest version "Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 (VB .NET) in 24 Hours Complete Starter Kit" which includes a DVD with a trial version of the latest Visual Studio.

Projects are all for Windows Forms projects including one session on automating Excel (from a Windows form). Visual Basic.NET's most exciting use for many is for the code behind ASP.NET Web Forms when developing applications with a web browser user interface. The author does mention such use very briefly but offers no examples. There are many fine introductory books at this same beginner level on VB.NET and ASP.NET; so if web applications are where you are headed, this book will not be the best choice.

This book might be nice easy step up for someone moving from the Excel macro (VB for Applications, VBA) world into more general applications. If you are a professional but new to VB, the book can be completed in a week end; and you can then pass it on to a kid just getting into programming. As noted by another reader, the description of the language is too brief to give this book value as a reference.

Author James Foxall has many books to his credit and writes nicely. For the most part he eschews the silliness of many professionals writing "down" for beginners. There are a surprising number of editing mistakes, but nearly all of the code runs as presented.

This book taught me how to get going with VB.NET. You won't find anything really hardcore here. but if you're looking to quickly get up to speed on VB.NET, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU! You'll be creating cool interfaces and programming objects in no time - well, 24 hours at least. lol :)

A+!

This book (unlike many others on the same subject) does NOT assume any previous knowledge of Visual Basic and helps the reader on the journey to learning vb.net with ease.It is well written in easy to understand terms and has me wanting to move on to the next stage already.The many examples in this book also provide a very good reference library for future use.

Mr. Foxall is a conversational writer who is easy to follow no matter what the subject matter is about. I have exchanged several e-mails with him and he is an extremely friendly person. Some of the Teach Yourself books are really not written for beginners, but this book is definitely easy to understand. As an experienced VB programmer, I found this book a great introduction to VB.NET.

You will learn from beginning to advanced level, everything you will need is included with useful examples. You will understand how to create Forms, Buttons, Controls, Methods, Events and also a fantastic Interface.

I am sure you will enjoy from author's sincerity. He treats you as a friend and you will learn things so good and quickly.

Finally, you will learn programming in Visual Basic platform. You can learn about Procedures, Functions, Operators, and at the end of the book you can take a look at Web Programming. I am sure you will find it useful. Try it!

The title says it all, Teach Yourself Visual Basic .Net. The book is divided into 24 chapters. Each chapter is supposed to take about an hour to finish. Some do and some don't, but they are balanced overall. The explanations are very good (I've read another book by James Foxall and the quality was good there to). He covers all of the material that you need to know, with lots of attention paid to building interfaces - something I was glad to learn a lot about. The author does focus on ADO in detail rather than ADO.Net, but I can see why he does this. The author is very good at 'teaching' you, by offering practical material and not just marketing fluff.

If you want to learn Visual Basic.Net, get this book!

I used Mr. Foxall's book "MCSD in a Nutshell, the Visual Basic Exams" as one of my reference books for my MCSD and I like his writing style: stressing the key skills and covering lots of information with reasonable depth. So I bought his new book "SAMS Teach yourself Visual Basic .Net in 24 hour" to learn VB .Net. After I read it, I found that it is a valuable book to learn VB .Net as a beginner. It is also a very good book to learn VB 6.0.

It is a very good book to learn VB .Net with reasonable depth in a short time with comparing the techniques in VB 6.0. If you had some experience in VB programming, and want to learn the skills in VB 6.0 and VB .Net, this is one book for your choice!

Jiqing HU
MCSD (VC++ and VB programmer)

This is a great book for learning visual basic .net. I liked how the author teaches you in the same order that you develop, first with the environment, then interface design, then coding, and finally distributing. The first chapter is a quick tour which has you building a usuable application right off the bat! This book won't make you an expert,but it will get you going and you can build simple programs that even work with databases when your done.

This book is great. The author has a way of explaining VB in a very understanding way. I got this book for under $3.00 new! It was the best $3.00 I spent this year!