Customer Reviews

Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are tired of worthless first-peek .NET books, this is the one to buy. I found the content to be excellent and the format good for picking and choosing what I needed. I particularly like Mr. Troelsen's approach of doing code by hand first before going through the VS.NET wizards.

Some of the single-chapter intros to .NET technologies were better than entire books I've read on the subject (quite a feat!).

This is a great practical companion to Dan Appleman's "Moving to VB.NET" which does a great job providing the theory behind .NET in general and VB.NET specifically.

Let's hope Mr. Troelson writes some follow-up books on the subjects he dealt with in one chapter in this book (may I suggest GDI+).

Being a VB6 programmer, I was looking for a good book to introduce VB.NET. After reading Cornell and Morrison's "Programming VB .NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers" and Appleman's "Moving to VB .NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code", I think Troelsen does a better job.

The two previous books are excellent with insight and tips on how VB has changed in VB.NET. (And yes, it's almost a new language.) Yet Troelsen takes the time to illustrate the concepts with very basic code and examples including output. Cornell/Morrison and Appleman have code examples too, but I felt they were cramped for space in their books. Thus, they left out some minor explanations that may make you say, "Aha!" Because of the sheer size of this book, it has plenty of fascinating details to programming with .NET.

By the way, the sample code for all these books are available on-line which is really helpful when it comes to investigating how things work in depth.

Something that stands out is that Troelsen starts with explaining the .NET Platform in detail enough to understand why VB.NET behaves as it does. For example, strings are immutable. Each of these books stresses and illustrates what this means, but Troelsen is the only one that clearly defines why.

Troelsen also writes clearly and concisely; his book is part teaching and part reference. For advanced programmers, perhaps Appleman would be a better choice as he jumps into complex topics and illustrates them with bare-bones examples (as an aside, Appleman is a very colorful writer and he tries hard to make reading enjoyable). For the rest of us with some programming experience, Troelsen goes that extra step to make it easier to understand. For the completely new programmer? While Troelsen does spend some time on the basics, I think some solid understanding of OOP and some VB6 exposure are really required.

Good luck with .NET everyone!

Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform is a big (and I mean BIG) book that tries to make everything clear to you that has anything or everything to do with Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform. This is exactly why I do not give the book 5 stars, because sometimes you get the idea that the writer is drowning in subjects. Andrew Troelsen (who has a nice comfortable and knowledge writing style by the way) wants to include it all but there is simply too much.

That was the only downside I ran into I must say. 4 stars is still a very good score and surely not without a reason. As mentioned before Andrew Troelsen knows in extreem detail what he is talking about and I would dare to rate him in the Appleman class. Just as Appleman often does, Andrew Troelsen throws in personal opinions about language and Framework aspects, which sounds scary, but this is just what you need when you are trying to learn a brand new Language. (Off-Topic: Yes, I said NEW language, you can just forget about comparing VB.NET to VB 6.0, it is no equal matchup in any way whatsoever). In pretty much all aspects a very good book. I enjoyed reading it very much.

A tiny warning is in order; Please do NOT buy this book if you are planning to 'get-up-to-date' with the technical capabillities of VB.NET and nothing more than that, as is often done by IT managers (no deep knowledge required for them, just an overview). This book will be completely wasted on you. Why ? Because it holds over a 1000 pages of the most detailed info you can get about VB.NET and the Framework. This books requires hours and hours of reading and practicing. The book will create a VB.NET Programmer, not somebody that 'knows something about it'. Get ready to do a load of work ... and get a load of knowledge back.

I am using this book for classroom training of VB.NET. It is easy to understand and fun to learn from. Some points about the book that I have include:

: This book dedicates a chapter to graphics programming with VB.NET using GDI+. Most other .NET books don't cover this.

: There are plenty of illustrations in the book to help explain the topics being covered. Too bad that there are fuzzy images (although still readable) in the book up to page 157; the remainder of the images are sharp.

: There must be an internal joke at Intertech about how to spell the word "busy" (see page 375). I thought for sure he would correct it after his C# book (see page 339, ISBN: 1-893115-59-3) came out. Maybe I am reading this section wrong.

: Much of the content of this VB.NET book is similiar to the content of his original C# book but with the VB.NET language and content corrections. This is an improved book!

: Many of the examples in his .NET books build upon each other. If you need to try an example in the middle of a chapter, you either need to build from the start of the chapter or download the source code.

: The online errata is quite nice on the Apress site. The author was given the power to update it on the Apress web site as he wishes.

: The info is skimpy on web services (roughly 45 pages). You will need another book on advanced web service techniques. I expect this with a "blanket" book on VB.NET.

I recommend this book to people wanting to learn VB.NET. It was written by a teacher who knows his stuff. The book is easy to read too.

I had received a copy of Andrew's C# book in one of his classes earlier this year, and had to get this book as soon as it came out. I loved this book too. I've been reading technical books for a long time and each time I pick up a Andrew Troelsen book I never regret it. With this new book, Andrew has delivered another winner. This book is a must have for any developer looking to make the jump to VB.NET. There is a ton of code packed into this 900+ page book. I would certainly recommend this to any VB developer looking to move to VB.NET. It is an easy-read and Andrew is really a gifted author. Thanks Andrew!

Overall this is a pretty good book but unfortunately it falls apart at the end. The first 2/3 of this book are very detailed and complete with most things shown from both the command line as well as from the IDE, but, I can only guess that the author got tired (the book is over 1,000 pages) and got a little sloppy for the last 1/3. Unfortunately, the last 1/3 has important topics like ADO.NET and ASP.NET. These are not covered nearly as well as the earlier topics. In addition, the author puts things like parameters in the code that he never bothers to explain. Perhaps he figures that by this point you should be knowledgeable enough to figure things out by yourself but I think he just got tired. Also, unfortunately, the number of errors goes up considerably in the last 1/3 of the book. Most frustrating is the fact that I took time to send the problems and corrections to the author and despite the fact that the publisher claims he will get errors corrected on the web site within 48 hours, none of my corrections ever appeared. Some were very blatant like a C# listing that should have been in VB.NET. Of course, it was pretty obvious that this was the VB version of his original C# text given this and many other smaller but similar errors.

Still, overall, its a pretty good book but authors should keep their errata up to date and the editor should have caught many of these mistakes if they put any effort into the proof reading.

I also think many of these early authors and publishers spent so much time figuring out how to do things prior to the release of the VS IDE that they feel compelled to tell you about things that took them a long time to figure out from the command line even though the IDE makes it so much simpler now. This exercise is insightful for teaching you more about how .NET really works but it gets tedious after a while. I would rather they spent the time making sure the book was correct and complete.

Again, it is a pretty good book but if the author could have persevered until the end and if he would keep his errata up to date it would have been really excellent.

This is a good book for the intermediate-to-advanced programmers making the switch to Visual Basic.Net from Visual Basic 6. Please NOTE: This is not a beginner book. The book provides a good overall coverage of most of the Visual Basic.Net topics but this book needs to be augmented with books that are more specific to the programming needs of the developer. For example, if the developer is going to develop Web forms in ASP.NET using Visual Basic.Net, they should buy a books that specifically written for that purpose. Overall,this is a 4-star book and I liked it well enough that I am going to buy Troelsen's "C# and the .Net Platform, Second Edition".

A couple of minor issues with this book.
1. Andrew Troelsen wrote "C# and the .Net Platform" first and it appears that he used the manuscript for that book to write this book. Several times in the book, the examples are in C#, not Visual Basic! See page 107. The editors failed to catch these errors.

2. Not including the index, this book is 1017 pages and that is divided up into 16 chapters. The average chapter is about 63 or 64 pages long. It seems that some of the chapters drag on and on and on.

3. There is very little cohesiveness between the examples in the chapters. In Chapter 4 (Object-Oriented Programming with VB.Net), each example does not build off of the previous example. Troelsen starts with an Employee example but finishes the chapter with a Car example. If you trying to follow along with his examples, you end up with several "Solutions" or "Projects" that are not related.

This is definitely a must for any experience Visual Basic programmer wanting to master VB.NET. It's not a book for beginners, it helps if you have some object orientated programming knowledge in visual basic for example. The explanations are very clear and concise and fun, its a very interesting book. The contents of the book includes all important object orientated issues, Inheritance, Encapsulation, Polymorphism and Data Access using ADO. NET. plus more. It's a five star book.

This book says that it is an "advanced Guide", but please do not interpret this as a book not suitalbe for beginners. Troelsen presents his material in the fashion of a college level course, but a 101 type course. It goes into detail about why things are as they are, which for me at least, is very helpful in understanding what .Net and Visual Basic.Net are all about. If you are the type who finds it easier to understand a subject when you understand its construction and dynamics, then this book is for you. If you are tired of the "dumbed down" approach, then this book, and the whole Apres series, it seems, is for you.

I can't imagine a more concise, oraganized, or clearly written book about VB.NET programming concepts and examples. This book provided a solid foundation on VB.NET, and at a pace that will delight even intermediate level VB 6 folks. My highest recommendation!