The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language (Microsoft .NET Development Series) (Paperback)

by Paul Vick (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Once in a while, Visual Basic goes through a paradigm shift. The recent jump to .NET was one, and The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language succeeds very well in explaining to programmers--and not just experienced VB programmers, either--what the changes mean to software architecture and implementation. If you need to figure out how VB.NET works, this book, more than any other, will help you make fast initial progress. This guide is clear; it's practical; it focuses on the parts of the VB.NET programming language and its runtime environment that every developer has to understand. You'll probably want to supplement this book with more specialized ones that deal with databases, networking, user interfaces or whatever specific capabilities you need to work with, but this book is probably the best place to start. The author's attention to coding style and software design is a bonus that will help you write code that not only runs, but is more self-documenting and easier to debug.

The educational value of this book is inversely proportional to its mass. It's a thinnish volume, but Paul Vick--who works for Microsoft and helped design VB.NET--makes such clever use of examples that it's likely you'll find answers to many of your questions (for example, "How do you write class constructors in VB.NET?" and "What does the VB.NET inheritance model look like?") in the form of executable code. Read Vick's explanations, examine and run his code, and you'll be well down the road to VB.NET proficiency. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to program in VB.NET, with emphasis on the core language itself rather than on any development environment or specialized API. Sections address basic and complex data types, operators, and exception handling. About half the book is a clear, example-driven explanation of object-orientation under VB.NET. An appendix deals with difference between the old Component Object Model (COM) and the new Common Language Runtime (CLR).

Product Description
This book describes the Visual Basic .NET programming language, starting with the simplest concepts first and gradually working up to the most advanced concepts. In this way it can be used both as a guide to the language for people new to VB .NET, as well as a reference for experienced VB .NET developers. While there are many books on the market on Visual Basic .NET, there are very few references, and no others from any core member of the Visual Basic development team. The tech reviewers have praised the clear writing style, the concise yet thorough coverage, the usefulness of the examples, and the effectiveness of the organization. Reviewers have also noted many topics not covered in other books, or not covered nearly as well, including events, delegates, versioning, obsoleting code, and using shadowing. Data collected by Microsoft indicate that the long-awaited move from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET should be in full swing as this book releases. A June 2003 survey conducte by Readex for SD Times shows usage of Visual Basic .NET among professional developers moving from 32% currently to 46% by June of 2004, a huge jump. The Visual Basic .N ET Programming Language is the one book that all VB professionals will need to have on their desk.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (March 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321169514
• ISBN-13: 978-0321169518
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #761,844 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Microsoft .NET Development Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book to read if you want to understand VB.NET., April 30, 2004

By	Kathleen A Dollard (Colorado, United States) - See all my reviews

I love this book.

I've been programming in VB for ages, well, the better part of ten years anyway. I've also been in VB.NET since the early betas, and I'm passionate about where the language is today and where it is going. I also think I know my way around the language pretty well.

So, I picked up this book mostly to see if I wanted to recommend it to beginning or intermediate programmers. What a surprise when I found myself learning, or at other times remembering forgotten details of the langauge. Paul has a great style, and hits the right level of detail and history. It isn't overwhelming, but he isn't afraid to get deep into the gritty details either.

This book is all VB.NET. It talks about the framework where the framework matters to VB. He talks about history when it helps explain something about the way VB is built. Beginner's may want to read it yearly for a while, and I doubt there is any VB programmer who could read this book without learning from it. For me, that combination in a readable format is as good as it gets.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, March 31, 2004

By A Customer

An excellent reference book for Visual Basic .NET!

There are a lot of good things about this book:
- It is precise but not terse.
- Examples are short and designed very carefully.
- There are a bunch of notes on historical or design aspect of the language. These notes brings the things into context. These are informative as well as entertaining.

The organization of this book is great. Especially if you are an instructor, its so easy to structure your course around this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some books leave you with a little; some leave you with a lo, March 24, 2004

By	Darren Neimke "_digory" (Adel. South Australia) - See all my reviews

Being a seasoned VB programmer I've learnt a lot about the language from some very smart people over the years - including people on the VB Team itself - and I was therefore keen to get my hands on Paul Vick's latest book to learn some further insights from one of the lead architects of the language.

The book itself is a brisk walk - coming in at a touch under 400 pages (which includes many reference-only pages) - but is crammed with useful nuggets about the language and how to put it to use. I read the book in a little under a week while travelling to and from work; at the end of each journey I was usually racing for my computer so that I could whip up some demo's of the things which I had read. In fact most times after reading a couple of paragraphs I was left thinking to myself: "So does that mean? ....".

Some of my favourite sections were:

Boxing and Unboxing - some of the clearest examples that I've ever read on the topic
Array Co-variance - very good; some of this was certainly new to me
Events and Delegates - a good mixture of high-level versus under the covers material
Statements - it's always good to learn new things about these
The book is structured in such a manner that it starts out easy and ends up with expert-level stuff. The stuff which taught me the most came near the end of the book with several chapters devoted to the advanced topics surrounding Object Oriented concepts, but I must admit that I learnt *at least* one new thing per Chapter.

This book will serve 2 purposes for me now that I've scanned it for a first time. Firstly it will serve as my main reference for all of those things which I never can seem to remember first time such as: Fundamental DataType storage size; comparing things other than non-equality in Select...Case statements; passing ByRef vs ByVal and where it *does* matter; in depth behaviour of Shadows, Overrides and Overloads modifiers; How to call Win32 api's using Declare statements. Secondly, this book will become my digest of all those little language quirks which I have built up in my head over the years.

Lastly, after reading chapters and sharing some of this stuff with my co-workers it would undoubtedly invoke many colorful conversations about programming adventures from the near and distant past.

All-in-all this book left me with a lot!