Customer Reviews

pmcgurn01 said
I recently purchased this book used here on Amazon. As I read it, I find that the material is very easy to pick up and I even find that I'm jumping ahead of the lessons and making my own code to do different things. This book is not the usual boring droning on type tech manual that I thought it would be. 5 stars.

jbeswick2 said
Really needs more examples, more thorough technical information, and real-life coding solutions (eg. how to write a DB application for retail stores vs. how cats inherits the animal object). Overall, pretty weak.

Anonymous said
I am a new programmer and would NOT recommend this book to someone else who's new. Wrox presents the intangible before the tangible and introduces concepts within concepts without explanation. An example of how the intangible is presented before the tangible is in chapter 4 where they introduce objects, classes, properties, methods, constructors, inheritance, polymorphism and namespaces(whew), but it's not until chapter 7 that they explain how to put a button on a form. Seriously out of order in my opinion. An example of how concepts are brought up without explanation all throughout the first 8 chapters (all I could stand) is how various code methods are used without referencing the big picture. What are other methods in the same class? Could some of the most common ones be listed in a glossary? I know there are a lot of them and they're somewhere in the MSDN library, but a beginning point of reference would have been nice.

This was such a frustrating book that I nearly gave up on learning programming all together. I decided to give it another try and can recommend two books that present everything in a clear and logical manner. Visual Basic .NET by the `In Easy Steps' people is the first. It's light, clear and offers a quick overview with lots of pictures. It isn't detailed, but it's not designed to be. I don't think you can buy these books through Amazon. This excellent series is available at Barnes and Noble. For greater detail I highly recommend Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET Step by Step. The book is true to name, meaning it establishes a building block approach and takes you through everything step by step. Its thoroughness is a joy. Michael Halverson understands the learning process and has a good sense of humor too. A Microsoft product with a sense of humor? Yes. It solved all my frustrations brought on by Wrox and made learning easy and fun.

pickinganickname said
This book has left me with more questions than answers. I'm new to OOP and this book certainly has not helped. The book said it was for "Beginning programmers" but after chapter 3 it assumes you magically know OOP concepts. It left me flipping around the book, searching for definitions.

I've purchased other Wrox books before and have been pleased in general. For some reason Wrox dropped the ball on this one. It's as if the book was written by three authors at different times and then compiled into one book, without regard for what you have or haven't already learned in previous chapters.

I wish there were a rosetta stone for new beginners to make the bridge to .Net. Until then I'll be searching for a better VB.Net book.

Anonymous said
This book helped with with my first job as a VB.NET developer. It covered VB.NET 2003 and was written for beginners who have no experience with VB.NET or OOP before. Get this book if you want a good teacher to teach you VB.NET