Customer Reviews

Visual Basic.NET Weekend Crash Course (With CD-ROM)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I bought this book elsewhere for full price. What a mistake that was.

Everything started out fine until I got to lesson 6. The code in the book does not work at ALL- there was also a slight difference in the coding too. What I did not realize was that THIS book was written in 2002. After doing a quick search online and reading the reviews here on Amazon I find out that the book's examples are geared to the BETA version of NET not the RETAIL (Final) version!(and that others had the same hair pulling grievances as me on Lesson 6) Course that's going to make a difference. It would have been nice if there was some mention of this in the beginning chapters of the book or at least have the remaining copies out there pulled off the shelves. I will probably keep the book anyway for reference purposes.

I also did not like how the author kept putting his own coding style in there. It is not the best in the world- Yes people do have thier own style but his is confusing to leave the default names! Guess I'll wait til my online course in September.

Word to the wise: Check the publication date on ALL computer books before purchasing for full price!!

I have tried two weekend crash courses. Their concepts are good but unfortunately both were written against beta versions of software it was supposed to teach about. I have actually corresponded via email with the author of Visual Basic .NET Weekend Crash Course and he admited as much. I understand he wanted to have a book ready to go when Visual Basic went from beta to production however he did not check the book against the official released version of VB.NET so it has turned out ot be a lousy book and a waste of my money.

My gripe with the book is he can't decide who his reader is. Quite a bit of the time he is writing to the VB programmer moving up to VB.Net. Other times he is writing to the very beginner, going over very basic programming concepts anyone who has done any programming would know (what is a variable?). And at other times, he assumes you know concepts of VB, that the programmer who has never used VB is not familiar with. And he doesn't get into object oriented programming concepts until the last Chapter, and not much then.

Many examples do not run propertly. Most will compile, but have runtime errors that prevent the program from working. Really if you are going to learn to code, you need code that works.

Look elsewhere for a beginners course.

I need to start out saying that I am a more advanced reader than this book is aimed at. I throw this in to make sure my potential bias is exposed at the start, lest it seem I am trying to mislead. Comparing to other reviewers, I do not think I am too far off the mark.

This book is aimed at beginners. It is probably a good start, conceptually, for those who need to get a grounding in Visual Basic .NET. A good candidate here is a VB programmer with some experience who is being forced over to VB.NET.

Most of the examples in this book fit the beginner mold, as they are simple, yet largely effective. There are some that do not seem to be coded the way I would code (including some that fail to work in the RTM), but the book was probably written off of beta 2.

The beginning of the book is tied into the IDE, and there are some screenshots of how to do things. Personally, I find Micrsoft's Coding Techniques book a bit better here, but it is not a beginner's book, so that would be comparing apples to oranges.

The best part of this book is the organization. The Weekend Crash Course series is nicely laid out in bite size chunks. If you follow the plan, you can easily get through the material in a weekend.

I agree with the earlier reviewer that having a stepped course is a good way into a programming language but the egregious coding errors in the examples were bad. I went through this with my son who is a learner, and he found it difficult to believe that the coding errors were not his.
The text parts of the book were also sprinkled with inconsistencies and bizarre jumps. A lot of the commentary is pretentious and patronizing. It would appear that the book did not have an editor at all.

I don't think it's too much to ask, to have a book which provides computer code... have code which actually works (performs the desired task). Too bad, the underlying design is a good idea. While i'm at it... editors... how about producing a book whose contents agree with "the curriculum" printed on the book's cover?

i bought this book to get a quick start with vb.net having c, c++ and mfc experience, i manged to get the examples to work, but i can see a beginner spedning hours trying to figure out why the sample code in lesson 6 does not work. this books practice bad programming technics in general.

While the book is at a level I can understand, the author spends too much time saying "Click on this, but we won't cover it in depth until Chapter XX". It's very confusing skipping around like this and in some cases he says try some code in one chapter that will still be in your project later on when he asks you to try something else, but doesn't mention how to deal with the code you tried 3 chapters ago...Delete it or add on..if add on how do you do it?

I'm only in Session 4 but getting ready to give up and try another book.

Claims to teach you VB.NET in just 15 hours. In session 6 of 30, the book give you sample code that doesn't work. I spent hours reviewing for _my_ mistake and hours more reviewing web sites and newsgroups. Found the example given simply will not work, and if it did would be very poor programming practice.

Also, in order to compress all of VB concepts into a small time, the book intersperses topics into completely unrelated sections. It made reviewing and debugging very dificult. After session 6 exasperations, I bought a new book.