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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the lot cause its the only one in the lot, February 28, 2001
While I used to be an avid fan of Wrox's books (my bookshelf bleeds red), I am getting less and less enthralled with some of the newer books. It seems that being first out with a book, and thus taking the lion's share of the market, is more important than writing a really good book. And, that's too bad. Rocky has written some excellent books in the past. Too bad this is not on par with them. This is not saying that the book is awful (it isn't), just that it is not quite as great as it could have been. As such, I rate it right down the middle.The first two chapters are largely background material (as mentioned by a previous reviewer). But, then so are chapters 3 - 7, if you look at it with a completely objective eye. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, but you do have to remember that the book is largely introductory. If you have not touched VB.Net with any depth, this is not a sticking point at all. There are a few areas with some minor mistakes and some portions that appear as if they were written with the PDC version and never completely updated. Most of these appear in the chapters that cover the Framework proper, so they should not pose any problems and you probably will not even notice them It is also annoying at times that going from chapter to chapter means re-reading the same material in different words, with a reference added to have me go back to the same material I have just read. If these were generally references back to material with much greater depth, the annoyance factor would be lessened. On the other hand, I like a book that has references to other chapters; when there is greater detail, this is a very good thing. I also noticed a sense of deja vu when reading a couple of the chapters. Looking back into the Introducing.Net book, some of the material is verbatum. If you have not read the book, you will not notice this, but it caught me as strange as my read through the first couple chapters was late at night and I got that eerie sense that I had a book with repeat pages in it. The book does provide a fairly well rounded presentation on the concepts of VB.Net. There are plenty of code samples to show you exactly how to code many things, and it covers a lot of VB6 code to help older VB Pros quickly move into VB.Net. As the book is aimed at VB and ASP developers, it hits this objective very nicely. The cream of the book, IMHO, is found in chapters 8 - 10, which cover the more advanced topics of VB.Net. While I believe there are some missing, you should be able to pick them up if you read one of the books on C#. The code structure is different, but you can ferret out the concepts and relate them to VB.Net. Overall, I was a little disappointeed ,as I was expecting a lot more depth from a book entitled VB.Net Programming with the Public Beta than I would a book called Introducing VB.Net. I am sure that more specific books are on the way as the technology ripens and goes gold. Summary: This is about an average IT book. Overall, it is fairly consistent, and, unlike some on the market, all of the code samples I have checked work (if you have bought many books in the past few years, this makes it well worth the price of admission). Note that I have not checked the code against the beta 2 changes so some of the concepts may be a bit dated in a few months. This is the only book on VB.Net on the market right now. As your other alternative is to attempt to read the SDK help file and experiment, you can save a lot of time with this book. This makes it well worth the money, unless you do not consider your time valuable. I hope that more VB.Net books hit the market soon to expand on the topics covered in this one. In the scheme of the entire IT book realm, this one is about average (3 stars). In the realm of VB.Net, it is currently running in a field of 1.
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