Rating: 
Summary: Good beginners Guide
Review: As a professional developer, I am constantly looking to upgrade my skills. This time around, I chose .NET. Specifically, VB.NET and ASP.NET. I looked around grabbing every book I could on the subject to learn it fast. Anne Price's book fell into my hands. At first, I first mistook it for a training manual from an expensive training seminar. It is written in a no nonsense format without all the extra filler. Each chapter covers a topic, with examples, exercises, objectives, and the necessary information to understand the topic. Unfortunately, given the scope of VB.NET no one author can offer depth and cover everything. Likewise, Price doesn't delve deeply into ADO.NET, XML, web services, or ASP.NET. But you will get some exposure as she does cover them.
Rating:
Summary: Good beginners Guide
Review: As a professional developer, I am constantly looking to upgrade my skills. This time around, I chose .NET. Specifically, VB.NET and ASP.NET. I looked around grabbing every book I could on the subject to learn it fast. Anne Price's book fell into my hands. At first, I first mistook it for a training manual from an expensive training seminar. It is written in a no nonsense format without all the extra filler. Each chapter covers a topic, with examples, exercises, objectives, and the necessary information to understand the topic. Unfortunately, given the scope of VB.NET no one author can offer depth and cover everything. Likewise, Price doesn't delve deeply into ADO.NET, XML, web services, or ASP.NET. But you will get some exposure as she does cover them.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book, I am very impressed
Review: I have been in programming business for a while, working mostly with procedural languages and somewhat with windows type programming (Access, ASP). I read reviews about this book and bought it. By now I have read half of the book and I am very pleased with it. The author presents concepts in very thoughtful understandable manner. Book has enough hands-on and examples. I rarely saw programming books where material has been presented in such orderly and logical manner. I feel like I made a real good progress. I will buy Murach ASP.NET as Anne Prince is a co-author.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I just passed my Microsoft MCSE and MCDBA certifications and am studying for the MCSD.NET (covering VB.NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and XML Web Services). While studying for my MCDBA I read Murach's SQL for SQL Server and was very impressed. So I bought Murach's Beginning Visual Basic .NET, Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO .NET, and Murach's ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET. I was very impressed with Murach's Visual Basic .NET. The book focuses on building Windows forms applications with light coverage of XML, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and web services. I liked the book because it delivers content in bite sized chunks (the 2 page Murach style). Most of the book focuses on building an application that covers the situations most VB.NET developers will face: forms design, classes, exception handling, database access, reading and writing XML files, and reading and writing text/binary files. The format is concept => example => hands on exercise. Concepts are introduced in a logical fashion. Terms are not used before they are defined. The book does a great job weeding through all the .NET possibilities and highlighting what's useful. As an example, to paraphraze page 446: there are 150 XML classes but at least know these 2; and, this XML class has 27 Write methods but at least know these 6. Anne Prince writes good tight VB.NET code that serves as good examples for developers new to VB.NET. The book may also be good for someone brand new to Visual Basic. However, it would be a good idea to first get some background on programming in general, object oriented programming, HTML, and XML before reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent first book for transitioning from VB6 to VB.NET
Review: I just passed my Microsoft MCSE and MCDBA certifications and am studying for the MCSD.NET (covering VB.NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and XML Web Services). While studying for my MCDBA I read Murach's SQL for SQL Server and was very impressed. So I bought Murach's Beginning Visual Basic .NET, Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO .NET, and Murach's ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET. I was very impressed with Murach's Visual Basic .NET. The book focuses on building Windows forms applications with light coverage of XML, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and web services. I liked the book because it delivers content in bite sized chunks (the 2 page Murach style). Most of the book focuses on building an application that covers the situations most VB.NET developers will face: forms design, classes, exception handling, database access, reading and writing XML files, and reading and writing text/binary files. The format is concept => example => hands on exercise. Concepts are introduced in a logical fashion. Terms are not used before they are defined. The book does a great job weeding through all the .NET possibilities and highlighting what's useful. As an example, to paraphraze page 446: there are 150 XML classes but at least know these 2; and, this XML class has 27 Write methods but at least know these 6. Anne Prince writes good tight VB.NET code that serves as good examples for developers new to VB.NET. The book may also be good for someone brand new to Visual Basic. However, it would be a good idea to first get some background on programming in general, object oriented programming, HTML, and XML before reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: I found it!
Review: I purchased this book because it claims to be easy to learn VB. Although this book does make certain tasks involved in writing VB code seem easy, they certainly are not. I think the major problem with this book is the fact that they use a "two page" approach to teaching. This means the explanation is on the left page and some "examples" on the right page. This is OK, except that some, if not most, tasks in VB require more than one page to explain. Therefore, the reader is left to try to guess and search for the concept the authors are trying to convey in the one-page explanation. I was forced to put this book aside and purchase another book that has more detailed explanations on what I'm trying to learn. This book IS NOT for the beginner!
Rating: 
Summary: Crammed
Review: I purchased this book because it claims to be easy to learn VB. Although this book does make certain tasks involved in writing VB code seem easy, they certainly are not. I think the major problem with this book is the fact that they use a "two page" approach to teaching. This means the explanation is on the left page and some "examples" on the right page. This is OK, except that some, if not most, tasks in VB require more than one page to explain. Therefore, the reader is left to try to guess and search for the concept the authors are trying to convey in the one-page explanation. I was forced to put this book aside and purchase another book that has more detailed explanations on what I'm trying to learn. This book IS NOT for the beginner!
Rating:
Summary: The best beginner VB.NET book, bar none
Review: I rarely write reviews of books. I am a novice programmer but not a novice to technical texts with a Masters in Chemistry and DDS degrees and post doctoral fellowships and board certifications behind me. I felt compelled here.
What I needed was a data driven large website. So I started learning VB.NET and I had a block understanding variables and flow of syntax etc. I felt like an idiot. I took home over a dozen books and still couldn't break the shell. Until I read Anne Prince's book beginning VB.NET and Eureka! You could make the case that I had built a base and this book was the camel-back-breaker but why wasn't title #9,#10 or #11 the one? Any of these was sufficiently downstream on the queue. Actually, the more books I read the more I felt like a retard. Yet another title and I am still not getting it. After finishing her book I catapulted right into advanced topics with no problem. But out of the process I wound up unwillingly doing a sweeping survey of all beginner material out there.
I think it is Anne Prince's school teacher style presentation. What all the rest miss over and over is that she completely respects the rule to not to introduce previously undefined new terms. You cannot define a "cat" to a five year old as a "quadruped domesticated mammal". Yet this is so frequently abused, probably because the tech books are often written by people without pedagogical background. The average age of the tech authoring community has some to do with it whether just not enough teaching experience or the overall tendency of younger people to break norms of all sorts. Probably commercial influences also force texts to appeal to broader reader base - some for reference seekers, some with prior skills, some converting from a different technology etc.
A good beginning book cannot be all things to all people. The last thing a beginner needs is labyrinths of choices. Remember how back in school they made you jump through hoops and councilors when you sought "choices". Beginners need a heavy handed structured and uniform approach. The author not only defines "cat" properly but she expects you to know that one and only definition in all future feline discussions! Kudos to Anne Prince! I also like the format of presenting figures on the opposite page which saves you from flipping pages to see figures - one of the most tiring aspects of all technical texts but taken to new nauseating heights in programming books. Even the non glossy parer made a difference - about 10-20% more reading time before your eyes conk out. The book binding is horrible - it fell apart but that little beef dwarfs before the rest of the cons.
I went out and bought Murach's VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET only because she was one of the authors. The title wasn't even exactly what I needed - a lot of emphasis on winforms and not the web. I was surprised to see that her name was omitted by amazon.com. However small role she may have in that book she was the sole reason for my buying it.
Rating:
Summary: I found it!
Review: I've been searching for a practical book on helping me master VB.NET, and I've finally found it in Murach's Beginning Visual Basic .NET. I have 5 other VB.NET books that will now gather dust while Murach's VB.NET goes home with me to read each night.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful resource for VB.NET beginners
Review: If you are new to Visual Basic .NET this is a wonderful book to start with. It is also a great book to keep handy on your bookshelf as a reference when you begin developing .NET applications. The book is thorough with screen shots, clean coding techniques, and useful examples. Language essentials are covered well along with the basics of Object Oriented Programming. The book includes a full chapter on XML along with several chapters for database devlopers. If you are a web developer you will find the final two chapters on web forms and web services resourceful. If you are a fluent programmer of traditional Visual Basic the book will act as a great resource to quickly learn the differences of VB 6.0 and VB.NET.
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