Customer Reviews

Visual Basic .NET Black Book

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

 

 

Being a programmer with 3 years experience and developing in VB6.0. I found this book to be a great reference book for me while I began learning VB.NET. I would ask myself while developing.. 'I can develop feature 'x' in VB6.0, so how does VB.NET handle 'x'.. and look it up'

The Black Book doesn't dive into the philosophies of VB.NET, but rather delivers straight forward code examples of how to do it. For grunt programming and experienced VB6.0 developers, I feel this book is a must on every developers book shelf.

The book is good for both experienced programmers and beginners. What I was looking well into was the ADO.Net chapters and they are very good.
I have more than 6 years of Delphi experience and this book was good for me to begin with and as reference.

Never expected that the book printed before a final release of VB.Net will not have any mistakes. At least after reading and running many examples from the book in VB.Net (final release) I did not meet any problem.
The book is great for both experienced programmers and beginners. ADO.Net chapters are much better, than in any other books I've already read.
I have more than 5 years of VB experience and before this book I was afraid, that VB.Net will take a lot of time to be learnt. After 3 days with this book I'm pretty comfortable with VB.Net

This book is excellent. One of the best I've seen. Loads of examples, good explanations, far more detail than I've seen other places. Answers nearly all of my questions. I recommend it to anyone!

If you deduct from this book everything that you can find in the Help files and a whole lot of unecessary code it would number a few hundred pages instead of the massive 1144 pages that it is.
I am an experienced developer and want something more than a (very good) manual. Perhaps it would suit a beginner better.
An example of code-bloat was a section on adding a data adapter to a form. The author describes a simple drag-and-drop approach but then proceeds to list the code generated behind the scenes - all 10 pages of it. You can see this for yourself on the screen if you have followed the example, and it is not even accompanied by any explanations.
Depsite it's size it wasn't always thorough. I wanted to find out what were acceptable values for the DataSource property of a ListBox but the property was not even shown in the list of 'noteworthy public properties' of the object, nor in the index.
It does however contain a great deal of information on all aspects of VB.NET which makes it useful for a reference book.

The book itself is a great reference tool. The disk that came with the book was broken because whoever mailed it didn't pack it right. When I contacted the seller, they said "sorry" but offered no replacement. Whatever.

This book is a OK book. I would buy "Programming visual basic.net (Core References) by Francesco Balena instead of this book. It fails in alot of areas to explain anything! Hey, I have heard good things in the past about the black book series, but don't waste your money on this one!