Customer Reviews

VB.NET Programming with the Public Beta

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is a standard for Wrox. Two chapter intro to the product and some brief history. Then go into a good chapter breakdown of the new stuff and the differences between old VB 6.0 and .NET. Explains the concepts of OO and how VB.NET handles that, and finishes with some small but real world-like applications.

Overall a good introduction book, some light reference material. Wrox continually produces good quality learning texts.

While I used to be an avid fan of Wrox's books (my bookshelf bleeds red), I am getting less and less enthralled with some of the newer books. It seems that being first out with a book, and thus taking the lion's share of the market, is more important than writing a really good book. And, that's too bad. Rocky has written some excellent books in the past. Too bad this is not on par with them. This is not saying that the book is awful (it isn't), just that it is not quite as great as it could have been. As such, I rate it right down the middle.

The first two chapters are largely background material (as mentioned by a previous reviewer). But, then so are chapters 3 - 7, if you look at it with a completely objective eye. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, but you do have to remember that the book is largely introductory. If you have not touched VB.Net with any depth, this is not a sticking point at all.

There are a few areas with some minor mistakes and some portions that appear as if they were written with the PDC version and never completely updated. Most of these appear in the chapters that cover the Framework proper, so they should not pose any problems and you probably will not even notice them

It is also annoying at times that going from chapter to chapter means re-reading the same material in different words, with a reference added to have me go back to the same material I have just read. If these were generally references back to material with much greater depth, the annoyance factor would be lessened. On the other hand, I like a book that has references to other chapters; when there is greater detail, this is a very good thing.

I also noticed a sense of deja vu when reading a couple of the chapters. Looking back into the Introducing.Net book, some of the material is verbatum. If you have not read the book, you will not notice this, but it caught me as strange as my read through the first couple chapters was late at night and I got that eerie sense that I had a book with repeat pages in it.

The book does provide a fairly well rounded presentation on the concepts of VB.Net. There are plenty of code samples to show you exactly how to code many things, and it covers a lot of VB6 code to help older VB Pros quickly move into VB.Net. As the book is aimed at VB and ASP developers, it hits this objective very nicely.

The cream of the book, IMHO, is found in chapters 8 - 10, which cover the more advanced topics of VB.Net. While I believe there are some missing, you should be able to pick them up if you read one of the books on C#. The code structure is different, but you can ferret out the concepts and relate them to VB.Net.

Overall, I was a little disappointeed ,as I was expecting a lot more depth from a book entitled VB.Net Programming with the Public Beta than I would a book called Introducing VB.Net. I am sure that more specific books are on the way as the technology ripens and goes gold.

Summary:

This is about an average IT book. Overall, it is fairly consistent, and, unlike some on the market, all of the code samples I have checked work (if you have bought many books in the past few years, this makes it well worth the price of admission). Note that I have not checked the code against the beta 2 changes so some of the concepts may be a bit dated in a few months.

This is the only book on VB.Net on the market right now. As your other alternative is to attempt to read the SDK help file and experiment, you can save a lot of time with this book. This makes it well worth the money, unless you do not consider your time valuable.

I hope that more VB.Net books hit the market soon to expand on the topics covered in this one. In the scheme of the entire IT book realm, this one is about average (3 stars). In the realm of VB.Net, it is currently running in a field of 1.

I am about to wear this book out because I use it so much. We are currently developing a new product based entirely on Microsoft's .NET platform, and I use this book constantly as a reference whenever I do any VB.NET development. So far, it has answered every question we ahve had.

To appreciate this book, you must have done some pretty serious development in Visual Basic 6.0 or another high-level language. It is not an introduction level book, but does a great job of introducing experienced Windows and web developers to the new VB.NET environment. If you fall into this category of developers and are considering a move to the .NET platform, then you definitely want this book!

Very nice overview of the new language. 1. The points you need to watch out when you code today 2. The migration 3. A good overview of the .NET platform 4. Detailed introduction to the new IDE. (Check out the ADO.NET tools that's so cool). 5. Thorough explanation for the OO in the new VB.

The reason i gave just four stars is mainly because i expected to have some more information about the .NET base classes, don't get me wrong you'de still get a lot of info when you read thru the book.

I have almost finished the book now (up to chapter 8). It is an excellent introduction to VB.Net and the authors explained the concepts very well. The code samples are easy to follow and accurate, well sort of. Although not the fault of the authors, some features are now superceded by Beta 2 version of the software. The most noticeable difference is in the data access area.

All in all, I find the book very useful and is a good introduction to VB.Net. The only exception is chapter 8 where the authors tried to cover too many topics at once.

Since the release of Beta 2, you need to be mindful of the differences between Beta 1 and 2 (the book understandably only covers Beta 1 but it does try its best to alert readers of potential changes). If I buy the book now I will use this book as a guide but also go through the walkthroughs and sample codes that come with Beta 2 installation which is more up to date.

The only other .NET book I've read is the Wrox "Preview of ASP+" which I thought lived up to it's title. For me, this book goes well beyond a preview.

I read the whole 433 pages over a span of seven days and with the knowledge I've gained I'm preparing to recommend using the .NET beta technology to begin development on an Enterprise system that (in our architecture) would otherwise require use of Visual C++ and the ATL. Now I know that with VB.NET you can easily create free threaded applications and objects and you can just as easily create Win32 services.

Everything you need to know about the changes (and there are many of them) is explained in detail. Chapter 5, covers object-oriented programming for those who are new to the concept and explains how VB.NET handles: inheritance, and function overloading.

Even if you can't find it in your local bookstore, buy this book (if you have the public beta of course), after you read this one you'll likely be ready to go in to your manager and build and a case for reasons to mirgate to .NET

Hate overly technical books but need the core information to simply get you up and coding VB.NET fast. Then this is the book for you. It's an easy read. They make good comparisons between VB6 and VB.NET. Hey by the time I finished this book I thought it was easier to write VB.NET then VB6.0. The information is correct and the examples are so easy to understand. This book is great as an Introduction and you'll be happy you read it. The reason I didn't give it five starts is I wanted to know even more by the time I finished it. It makes you wish your company would drop the (legacy..he..he) VB6 today and let you get in to coding VB.NET. When your've finished you will no longer avoid talking to the C programmers of this world. GO on buy it!!!, it's worth every cent....got to go ...sheep to feed.

Some of the other WROX books dealing with very new technologies have lacked structure and tended to repeat themselves, repeat themselves, often. Not so, with this book.

Given that VB.NET is still in beta, I was pleased to find that the authors had done a very nice job of structuring things into logical groupings. They covered concepts in a concise manner, while still maintaining all the essential elements for topics.

I would suggest this book to anyone interested in learning VB.NET. It also makes a good learning tool for VB6 - since much of the text is dealing with changes between VB6 and VB.NET.

Some other publishers offer free updates to owners of their "beta" books. It would be nice if WROX implemented something like this also. I would like to read what the authors of this book have to say as VB.NET moves into production.

Indeed, it's almost the only VB.NET book currently out there but we could argue that there is a multitude of newsgroup & boards that contains a lot of information on the upcoming VB.NET. Because of that time issue, the book is indeed somewhat smaller than, let's say, a Professional VB.NET book or a Business Objects.

However, if we dig further in the information that is offered in this book compared to the available information on the web, you will undoubtfully find this book quite interesting and you will definitely understand a lot more about the new VB.NET than you would without this book.

The TOC is more than available so I won't go over it but let's just say that you will definitely find out what's new, what is completely different from VB6, how to work out the new web capabilities, how to work with ADO.NET, and much much more. The information on those subject are well explained and thought out.

All in all, if you have the slightest curiosity in VB.NET and wish to know more, this book is definitely your best bet for now.

Thanks to those who had kind things to say about this book. Rocky and I had a blast writing it, and we're glad it was helpful.

But things have moved way beyond beta one now, and this book is obsolete and out of print. Recently we finished a complete rewrite of this book for the production version of Visual Basic .NET. That new book is called "Fast Track Visual Basic.NET." We used this book as a starting point, but we did a lot of refinement, and we think it's an even better intro to VB.NET.

If you liked this book and wanted to recommend it to others, point them to "Fast Track". I've placed a link to it in the section above on alternatives to this book.

Billy Hollis