Customer Reviews

Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is positioned somewhere between Beginner and Intermediate. It begins with Visual Studio's integrated development environment (ICE). If you've programed in something before, most of the concepts of the IDE and of the language itself will make sense to you and allow you to become productive quickly. I don't think it would matter which language you have used, just being a bit familiar with the programming concept is enough.

The book begins with a fairly quick overview or introduction to the IDE, the language and an introduction to programming. This lasts about a third of the book, maybe a bit more. At the end of this time you will have a good overview of the language. Part II of the book covers object oriented concepts, classes, structures, namespaces, collection classes, generics. Part III is called graphics, but it also includes things like printing and producing reports using Crystal Reports. Part IV is called Interacting with the Environment and is on using external resources such as the system registry, files, streaming data and so on. By the end of Part IV, you will be a fairly accomplished programmer.

The last third of the book is a series of appendicies. These provide a concise reference book for the language. This is a convenient way to combine the tutorial approach with the reference book approach that will give the book greater usefulness as you actually work in the language.

Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference is an outstanding text to a terrific new product from Microsoft. I am a non professional developer (General Practitioner writing medical practice software) and I had become bogged down with the complexities of printing and database programming in Visual Studio 2003. Visual Basic Express and this book have given me a real boost and my projects are moving ahead at last.

For me this book is just the right level. It doesn't assume your are an idiot or waste time on Windows basics. The 1058 pages (I have the electronic version) are full of concise explanations, just the right level of detail and hardly a page goes by without a relevent screen shot or code example (code is king!). There is a 6.7M zipped file of code samples that are full of really useful examples.

For anyone struggling with printing in Visual Basic 2005 then this is the one. For me the jewel in this book was code to easily print paragraphs and page numbers on multiple pages and I have slightly modified this to produce a little report writer to print paragraph chunks of text in any font, in any place and on multiple pages. I have struggled with this for so long. By far the best discussion of printing I have ever seen in a Visual Basic text.

Rod is very adept with handling graphics in VB and I have only touched on some of his routines for handling screen graphics. And a good introduction to OOP.

28 chapters and 18 appendices cover a lot of ground. As a bonus Rod has an excellent web site and a regular newsletter full of useful tips.

This is a terrific book. My opinion as an Aussie who finds it relaxing to write VB code is that you are unlikely to be disappointed and that it is a dinki-di bonzer book and you'd be a mug not to get it. Well that's my 2 bobs worth.

As a C-family programmer with a math background, I found the author's approach to presentation to be excellent: in 3 critical ways.

1) Unlike most VB books, he separates IDE (Integrated Devel. Env.) issues from the actual coding examples. In other words, while the IDE treatment is good, one needn't concern oneself with the IDE in order to understand the fundamental attributes - both syntactic and semantic - of the language. To put it as simply as possible: my objective was to know *what the code looks like, and what it does* as a language, not as a language-cum-development environment. (It's also worth noting that Visual Studio is *not* the only available development environment.)

2) The author spends a lot of time on definitions, and doesn't assume any pre-existing knowledge of the language. Syntax charts appear before presentation of any language construct, so that the reader can clearly see what options are available for that language construct *before* the author begins to actually describe the variations.

3) The examples rely on forms *only* when necessary. From what I can tell, most VB books are addressed to VB programmers - who seem to think of the entire language as being built around forms. (While this may be a historically understandable view, clearly it's inaccurate, given that it's possible to write form-independent and useful component code, such as for use in an ASP .NET application.)

Let me close by saying that after struggling through a number of VB books that were clearly oriented towards forms and/or holding the reader by the hand when it came to walking through the IDE in *every single example*, but were relatively weak when it came to the fundamental syntactic and semantic characteristics of the language, it was a pleasure to read this text, in which *definitions* and *semantics* came first!

If you are looking to have your hand held so you can walk through each example with the IDE, or seeking a "cookbook" that will tell you how to write such-and-such a routine, this may not be the right book for you. But as a programmer who has learned many languages, the first thing I want to know with any new language is: *how to write the code in plain text, and what the code I've written will actually do*.

After reading another Wrox tome (the title of which I won't mention), browsing at my local B&N, and consulting many possible resources on line, this is the best text that I've found which satisfies that seemingly simple-minded criterion. And at Amazon's excellent price, this is a bargain you can't afford to pass up!

This is a doorstop size book that contains a lot of very useful information, explanation and guidance.

The author has an easy to read style, which doesn't avoid technical terms, but doesn't wallow in them just to impress you either. The book contains four main parts covering a wide range of VB2005 topics, plus a very useful set of Appendices.

Part 1:Visual Studio IDE.

I think there is always a dilemma for authors when describing the IDE. On the one hand, if they are not careful they end up producing a long boring list of toolbars, windows, menus, etc, which will soon have the reader nodding off over the book. On the other, if they describe each of these elements in detail, you would probably end up with a 1000 page book that never gets past the IDE description.

The author has walked the line between these two extremes, dropping in additional detail on key areas as necessary. For instance in the section on Project Properties and the Compile Tab, he makes use of the opportunity to reinforce the positive reasons for having Option Explicit and Option Strict turned on.

Similarly, he includes real world examples of how you might find particular Debug menu windows useful.

Part 2: Object Oriented Programming

The section on OOP contains a good introduction to key principles and practices in this area. Clear code samples to demonstrate points and useful diagrams to clarify the tricky areas all help demystify what can be a difficult subject for newcomers.
I particularly liked the detailed section on Collection Classes, but would have liked more on the relatively
new area of Generics .
As OOP is a topic that many Classic VB upgraders will have to get to grips with, this Part of the book will give them a useful introduction to the subject.

Part 3: Graphics.

This Part of the book is really excellent. If you have visited the VB-Helper web site you will know that Rod Stephens is an absolute master in this field and his skills shine through in this section.

He manages to explain a whole range of graphics topics very clearly - and not just the relatively easy stuff. Difficult techniques such as Transformations and Graphics Paths are well explained with description, code samples and screenshots.

I found that the downloadable sample code was particularly useful in this part as I was able to copy/paste and recycle some of the advanced examples for a project I was working on at the time.


Part 4: Interacting with the Environment.

This final Part includes coverage of a range of topics, including Configuration, Resources (much improved in VB2005), Streams, Useful Namespaces, and a wide review of File and IO issues.

Summary

It is clearly written. The Graphics section is extremely good. In fact it is the best coverage of the topic of GDI+ for VB.NET that I have yet seen.

Overall this is a good Programmer to Programmer level book which has plenty of code samples, clear narrative and comprehensive coverage of important topics. Apart from anything else, personally I think this book is worth the asking price just for the information contained in the Graphics Part alone.

Good overview of a complex topic. There is much new in VB2005 compared to 2002 and 2003 and this covers these succinctly. The best part is his coverage of the printing capabilities in .NET. This is a very involved topic and it is well explained in the book including a method that I used to create a printing class that can handle printing a variety of different text blocks.

Of equal importance: when I had a problem with the printing routine, I went to the web site (www.wrox.com) and was able to discuss the problem directly with the author - this is invaluable to me as I am not a programmer by profession, but use VB.NET to write software for our anesthesiology practice. Mr. Stephens' responses were prompt and very useful.

Highly recommended.
Alan G. Mowbray
amowbray@charter.net

This is must-have for all VB programmers whether you are a novice programmer like me or the serious developer.

This is the one of the two (the other book is Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005) that I would recommend buying. Visual Basic 2005 Programmer Reference is not the kind of books where you read it, learn something, and then throw the book to one corner. If this is the case, I would just recommend borrowing the book from a local library. But it is the kind of book where you will frequently refer to.

1000 pages of information neatly organized into 18 chapters and 18 appendices. The organization of content, especially the appendices is what makes me feel worthwhile to own this book; it provides you quick and easy lookup of information.

There is a chapter that offers a very good introduction to Windows Form Controls and a dedicated appendix that houses the related materials. This chapter-appendix buddy is easily one of highest frequency lookup because one just cannot remember so many controls with their vast amount of methods and properties.

Another worth mentioning is the Graphics Category which spans from Chapter 19 to 24, my favorite of the book. this is where you will get impressed by Mr Stephens 's expertise in coding drawing related applications. Through these chapters, I had learned lots of tips and hence, leading to the birth of my own custom graphing and painting applications.

Apart from supplying all the how-to information, Mr Stephens also packed some very useful code examples sprinkled across the book that will definitely enlighten readers. While the book provides tons of information like introducing the IDE, the Visual Basic Language, Object-Oriented Programming, Windows Forms, Drawing and Printing to File Handling..., I am a bit disappointed with the lack of contents for the more advanced topics like Regular Expressions and Threading. However, Mr Stephens do make it a point to mention these advanced topics and had provided some links for further read up. For these advanced topics , I recommend Programming Visual Basic: The Language by Francesco Balena which I used in conjunction with the reference book.

Finally, the purchase of this book also gave me an extra bonus. Whenever I encounter any problem, I just post it on Mr Stephen's site or at the Wrox forums, and Mr Stephens or other programmers will provide the help.

This was an excellent first VS 2005 book. It had more than I expected with its drawing tutorials and various IDE settings.
Its a good refernce for new programmers and seasoned developers.

I have found, Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer) to be a very good reference source. The book offers both Visual Basic references, and .net framework references side by side. I as a newer programmer (novice - intermediate ), and have been looking for a bridge, that goes between beginner and advanced. Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference, has done just that!

The gap that existed for me, was filled in quite nicely. I have been struggling with more advanced concepts and now, I have begun to make the progress that seemed to elude me.
If there is anyone out there looking for the same "bridge", I would recommend this book without hesitation.

This is an extremely handy collection of reference material covering many topics. It's well organized and easy to use. I find that browsing this book is easier than surfing the net for answers (most of the time).

I was somewhat frustrated that the chapter dealing with structures and classes said that... Classes are faster when dealing with arrays... Yet there was no example of how to use classes with arrays... And for me, I don't see any other way I would want to use classes.

For example... I was trying to make a layer system for an image manipulation program.

Code such as:
DIM layers(10) as new bitmap
So in order to get layers I had to resort to 3, 3dimensional arrays.
RED(x,y,layer number) etc.

I am sure the book is only frustrating to me because I used it mostly for the graphics section and for code tailored to manipulation of graphics.

I am sure this book is all fine and dandy if you are reading it with no particular focus in mind. But, if you are reading a chapter and then immediately try to apply it to a specific situation, you may come into problems that the book does not address.

But I guess that is how programming works. Even if you know what you are doing you still run into problems when you take your idea from... idea to actual programming.