Rating: 
Summary: Anything but "Mastering"
Review: After reading this book, I still had to read two more to get real world applications developed.This book could be usefull for an absolute beginner, but even if you had never seen VB .Net in your life, you could benefit more with other books. I gave it three stars because the chapter on the TreeView, and the ListView controls were usefull because there were important changes in the way those controls are used, but the ADO chapters just get you confused, I had to read another book on ADO .Net to fully understand how some of the examples worked. The sample applications on the CD-ROM are completely different from the code that is printed, so there's no way to know what the thing is doing after you've spent too much time figuring out on you own. If you're a beginner, get it, you will find some things helpful, but if you know your stuff, just avoid it.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books on VB.net
Review: Anybody can write a book, but not everybody can teach what they know in a simple and very didactic way, this book does just that. The book is good if you are a beginner, because when you are reading the first chapter when they explain Visual Basic functions, procedure, classes, and so on, you feel like you are reading a magazine. My favorites chapters are 20 and 21, in which they review the Access database Northwind, explain SQL language then mix it all together in a very comprehensive way. The following ASP chapters are also incredible.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent place to start for experienced VB6 programmers
Review: By listening to all the Microsoft hype about how easy the transition would be for experienced VB6 programmers, I was sorely deceived about how steep the learning curve would be. This is a whole new language! After struggling to get oriented using the documentation that came with Beta 2, I gave up and went to the bookstore. Of the many books that I perused, this looked like the best. I went straight to Chapter 21: Building Database Applications with ADO.Netm and what a relief! The author leads you from the simple to the complex. The writing is very clear. I have not needed to resort to the sample code on the CD. The author clearly understands what typical Windows applications need to do. His examples are exactly what you want to do in the real world. For example, on one form, the user enters part of a customer name in a textbox. The adjacent listbox is immediately populated with matching customer names. When you click on a customer name in the listbox, the first data grid shows orders for that customer. When you click on an order, the second data grid shows the order details for that order. Every detail of creating the connection, data adapter, and datasets is included, both using the wizards and doing it in code. How to populate the data grid from the data set, how to synchronize all of the controls. Terrific stuff! The author is very helpful in providing further suggestions about real-world applications. For example, he cautions you when using data sets that you must limit the results returned to the client (and he shows you how to do that). He advises on error handling steps that are needed. He points out weaknesses in the tools. Very helpful advice for when you move beyond the examples in the book, which are simplified by necessity. I'm not sure how good the book is for absolute beginners. But it is very thorough. Chapter 20: Databases: Architecture and Basic Concepts explains the fundamentals of databases, SQL queries, stored procedures, just an excellent overview. Yes, the book is lite on Web applications, but it has an "HTML Primer", covers development of Web app's, database access, and XML. Plenty to get you started. And, you really do need another whole book to learn the details of ASP.Net. And, yes, there are some errors in the book, and as of mid-March, there is zero in the publisher's errata page. But this is so typical of programming books. And, I haven't run into any problems that I couldn't figure out. So, if you already have some experience with VB6, I can heartily recommend this book as the place to start for VB.Net. Just an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Quality book from Sybex
Review: Congratulations to Sybex for distributing the book in PDF format on the CD. I installed the book on my PC and now I can jump to any chapter/section and search for any word. Works better than any indexing scheme for me and the figures are in color. I wish more publishers would provide their books in electronic format. The book is great. It covers more topics than any other book on VB. You'll find more information on graphics and GDI+ in this book than in all others combined. The same is true for many topics, like the print controls, the new collections (ArrayLists, HashTables) and the StringBuilder class, to mention the ones I've found most useful so far. The chapter on printing, for example, includes several interesting samples, including one that prints tabular data. All the topics are well explained and demonstrated with small appls, not just a few statements.
Lots of useful code.
Rating:
Summary: 'ware: tread lightly.
Review: Evangelos Petroutsos, Mastering Visual Basic.NET (Sybex, 2002) It's hard to rate such a multiple-personality book as this one. Much of what is here is in error, or subject to interpretation, at the very least; something unforgivable in a programming book. And yet, when I need a quick reference or a refresher on how to do something basic, this is usually the first place I turn. So there IS some value to it, at least that's the way I see it, but I can't unhesitatingly recommend it for egregious editorial (one assumes) errors. This is certainly a book for those (like me) who have almost no familiarity with Visual Basic. I'd done a little program modifying a few years ago for my company, and had worked with a much, much earlier version of VB (2.0, for those of you who remember the stone age) a ways back, but my development knowledge lies in other areas. Petroutsos' book, combined with my knowledge of C++ and SQL, got me up to speed exceptionally quickly, but non-programmers picking this up as their first programming book are likely going to be extremely frustrated finding errors they don't know how to debug in the published code. But for the programming veteran who's just a novice to Visual Basic, there is likely a lot to be learned from this book. Just watch your step. ** 1/2
Rating:
Summary: Very useful book
Review: Having just played around with Visual Studio.Net, wrestling through the enormous amount of help pages coming with it, I thought this might be a nice book to give me some organized help. It turned out to be more than that. VB.Net will somewhat turn your world upside down if you are coming from the VB6 world. This book gives you a good guidance through making the switch to VB.Net and it is also a good reference using Vb.Net. I cannot judge if this is a good book for beginners but for the experienced VB programmer it touches the VB topics which are affecting you making the switch to VB.Net.
Well worth buying.
Rating: 
Summary: Put this one back
Review: I bought the book, I'm glad I bought it, and it's more than paid for itself. It's geared toward beginners but there's a lot of material, A LOT, that will be of benefit to experienced developers. If you've used VB6's richtextbox control, you may well find yourself unpleasantly surprised with VB.NEt's implementation. This book did a lot to bridge the divide. His coverage of Office Automation is also excellent, because it's hard to write a large scale app these days without someone wanting it automated in word, exported to Excel, charted and pivot tabled, or sent to their Outlook folder.... And BTW, his other book on database programming is one more must have!
Rating:
Summary: Keep this one handy
Review: I bought the book, I'm glad I bought it, and it's more than paid for itself. It's geared toward beginners but there's a lot of material, A LOT, that will be of benefit to experienced developers. If you've used VB6's richtextbox control, you may well find yourself unpleasantly surprised with VB.NEt's implementation. This book did a lot to bridge the divide. His coverage of Office Automation is also excellent, because it's hard to write a large scale app these days without someone wanting it automated in word, exported to Excel, charted and pivot tabled, or sent to their Outlook folder.... And BTW, his other book on database programming is one more must have!
Rating:
Summary: Put this one back
Review: I found this book to be riddled with errors both in the text and the programming examples. The exercises left out key information and required additional debugging and programming just to make them work correctly. Several of his screen examples did not display the correct information and were misleading. Other screens examples might have been semantically correct, but were not correct within the context they were presented. In my opinion the book also presented the information backwards, the concept of creating custom controls and such was covered in the beginning of the book while database access and file access were covered at the end.
Rating:
Summary: Best VB.Net book on the market
Review: I have read every VB.Net book on the market and this is the best by far. This guy not only tells you the basics, he also lets you know some pitfalls of vb.net. Best coverage on VB.net printing on the market(most through). I found the code to be very useful in real life applications. I wish all programming books were like this one. This should be in every VB programmer's library.
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