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Summary: Best treatment of OOP for VB NET!
Review: I have most of the VB NET books out there and I agree with the reviewers who say that Cornell's is the best one for learning inheritance and interfaces. He also has the clearest treament of delegates and events that I have seen. I don't know how anybody could give this book only one or two stars. It is a great, great book. It does exactly what it says it wants to do: teach you the object oriented foundations of programming in VB .NET. It's not a book with much on ADO .NET or ASP .NET but they make it clear that that is not their aim.
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Summary: Common sense and practical
Review: I teach programming topics, VB in particular. I have probably ten books on VB.NET and I needed to choose which would be a good one to use to use to teach a class. After reading all of these books, I have found this is the best one to learn from so far. The book is easy to understand for us VB people who need to get up and running with VB.NET as soon as possible. It's the one to get.
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Summary: An excellent resource for those wanting to learn VB.NET
Review: I was looking forward to upgrading a few small applications that I've written in previous versions of VB to VB.NET, but wasn't sure exactly where to start. This book formed an excellent basis. Even if you've only had a little bit of experience with VB, you should find it to be an invaluable resource for learning the ins and outs of OO programming and VB.NET's implementation. The book provides very through coverage of most of the important concepts that real-world developers will need. It does move quickly through most topics (perhaps the reason for the "A Guide for Experienced Programmers"), but I found the pace to be perfect for me (although I'll be re-reading some sections soon). In fact, the only portion of the book that I found to be lacking was coverage of database access using ADO.NET. The book does provide a brief chapter on teh topic, but refers the reader to the documentation for more details. A little extra coverage here (especially since dealing with data sources is such an important topic for real-world developers) would have been helpful. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to get an great basis of knowledge for working with VB.NET. Good luck!
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Summary: Bang on
Review: If anyone needs to know about how VB .NET should be programmed, and programmed well, they ought to buy this book. Its so well explained and it really gave me what I was looking for from this book. Don't miss out on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: A Rush Job
Review: It is painfully obvious that this book was an attempt to be one of the first on the shelf following the release of .NET. It does introduce some useful differences in .NET and VB6, but there are tons of typographical and grammatical errors that make reading it difficult at times. I am a software developer, but I also took a few English classes along the way.
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Summary: A wonderful book, clear and to the point
Review: Of all the books I bought to learn VB NET, this is the one I find myself turning to repeatedly for information on object oriented programming. The author' treatment of inheritance and delegates/events are models of clarity. I also found his treatment of mutithreading to be clearer and far easier to understand than the new Wrox book which was supossedly devoted to threading. If you want a book on the VB NET language you can't do any better than this one!
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Summary: OOP in VB.NET: This is the book !
Review: The 3 chapters on OOP (Classes and Objects, Inheritance and Interfaces, and Event Handling and Delegates) are by far the clearest I have read on the subject. That goes for both text and example code, which are working! If only for these 3 chapters, which cover 40% of the 422 usable pages, it's worth the price of the book. Gary Cornell does state that these 3 chapters form the core of the book, and after reading this book and Dan Appleman's "Moving to VB.NET", I totally agree that developers "will find it extremely hard to take advantage of VB.NET's new powers" if they don't utilize OOP in VB.NET. Knowing, and being comfortable with, OOP makes it so much easier to develop solutions using VB.NET, and the .NET framework in general. I thought the 2 intro chapters on VB.NET IDE and "vocabulary" were informative and not boring, and that goes for the chapter on Multithreading. I would have liked to see a longer and more detailed treatment of Error Handling, and some "real" examples for the Windows Forms chapter. In "About This Book", the author set 3 objectives: a complete treatment of OOP in VB.NET, fundamentals of VB.NET techniques, and differences between VB.NET and earlier versions. He has succeeded in these 3 objectives! I will disagree though with the note on not assuming any knowledge of earlier versions of VB. Experienced VB5/6 programmers WITH some real C++ (OOP) experience will benefit the most from this book.
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Summary: Will help you make the transition from VB6 to VB.NET
Review: The book is primarily designed for experienced Visual Basic developers making the transition to VB.NET. However, it can also be appreciated by other experienced programmers regardless of their programming background. The book begins with an introduction to the differences between VB.NET and VB. The next chapter introduces you to the new Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE). You will get a tour of the main windows, and learn how to compile and debug your VB.NET applications. Chapter three teaches the VB.NET syntax. You will learn the VB.NET expressions, operators, and program control flow. The next couple of chapters form the core of the book. These chapters cover object oriented programming and inheritance. VB.NET is the first truly object oriented programming version of VB, and a solid understanding of these new features is essential in taking full advantage of VB.NET's new powers. The next few chapters go on the cover important topics such as, event handling, error handling, building user interfaces, input/output streams, and multithreading. The final two chapters give a brief introduction to database access with VB.NET using ADO.NET, and a brief overview of ASP.NET. The book provides clear and complete coverage of all topics. It includes many real world code examples which help the reader to better understand all the concepts presented.
Rating: 
Summary: Gee whiz .NET book
Review: This "gee whiz" .NET book is based on Beta 2. It is a great intro to OOP theory, but it is not necessarily a good starting place for learning VB .NET programming in the real world.
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Summary: GoTo Hell
Review: This book appears to be a good bit more helpful than Dan Appleman's odious "Moving to VB.NET". However, one statement is very off-putting for me: "...one can argue that there is one time when using the GoTo actually makes your code cleaner and easier to understand. In VB.NET, this situation could occur when you are deep inside a nested loop and some condition forces to leave all the loops simultaneously." At the risk of sounding like a fanatic, I have been writing structured code for over twenty years and I have never once been forced to use a GoTo due to lack of a better, structured solution. For that matter I have very rarely found my self "deep inside a nested loop" in all those years. In structured, modular (and now object oriented) design there are infinitely better ways of handling things than the old prestructured wheels-within-wheels approach of ancient COBOL and FORTRAN. Anyone in the year 2002 professing to be competant enough to be writing a "Guide for Experienced Programmers" who can't figure out how to avoid using the GoTo statement and "deeply nested loops" loses a lot of credability with me. This said, if your choice is between this book and Appleman's awful, useless tome, buy this one.
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