Rating: 
Summary: Does exactly what it's title says
Review: This book is a GUIDE for people with programming experience to using VB.NET. If you are an experienced VB developer, this book will be of GREAT use to you in converting. If you are a programming novice, the high speed approach used in this book will probably leave you unable to do much in terms of real programming. The explanations are so clear, that it may still be useful for a novice though. For people who are using other languages, and want to try their hand at VB, this is also probably very useful, especially if you know Java.Please note that this is NOT a complete how-to, nor do the authors attempt to infer that it is. It is just a rational explanation of the core bits of VB.NET and how the language has changed from VB5/VB6. In particular, their breakdown of the new totally OOP approach of VB is very good, although it may bore you a bit if you have a solid understanding of Java. In an hour with this book, I knew more about the new features/changes in VB than I did with two days of studying the docs from Microsoft.
Rating: 
Summary: Misleading title
Review: This book simply doesn't have enough information to be named "a guide for EXPERIENCED programmer". It is rather a quick overall introductions. So don't get this book if you need to get some serious work done.
Rating: 
Summary: Good VB.NET introduction, two minor mistakes
Review: This book was quite good! It had an especially good introduction to delegates and events. However, I should point on that the multithreading seems to have a minor mistake when talking about UI programming. The author creates a delegate pointing to the UI code, but doesn't use the Control.Invoke method to actually execute it on the right thread. (I checked this by displaying the name of the thread.) Anyone figure this one out? Also, brackets were left out when doing bitwise comparison of file attributes, so it wouldn't work. But believe me, these two minor errors are less than most of the rushed out .net books I've read! There are other good titles on Apress, like the VB and the .NET platform (Troelsen), which is not as comprehensive as you would think, but is still filled with good stuff. Another good one is The Book of VB.NET (Macdonald), which has lots of little developer insights scattered throughout. But take my advice and stay away from the Wrox Professional VB.NET. The great red menance isn't as good as it once was.
Rating:
Summary: Good introduction, but only takes you so far
Review: This is a good introduction to VB .NET, but I think some better, more detailed books have been published after this one. This book has many minor errors. Gary Cornell posted several dozen corrections on the Apress web site, but I'm sure I found just as many errors that have not yet been corrected. Most of the errors are just typos, so I guess that shouldn't keep you from buying the book. However, I think Apress should try to improve their editing. More importantly, nearly all of the example code in the book is of the "Hello, World!" caliber. The code demonstrates the concepts ok, but generally is of little use in a real-world application. For instance, I don't think I'll ever have need for the Knife and Fork classes or the Programmer.Eat method, but I could be wrong. I've also found little demand for foo and bar classes in my part of the country, but maybe we're special. I think you could find another book with much more code that could actually be reused. Also, the book does not come with a CD. You can download the code from Apress, but there is no electronic version of the book available for searching. If you're looking for a VB .NET reference to use over and over, I think you should find one that includes an electronic version you can quickly search. Finally, the final chapters of the book are extremely short and cursory, hardly more than long magazine articles really, barely covering important topics like database access, ASP .NET, and COM interop. If these topics are important to you, this book is not the one for you. I bought this book in January, but if I were shopping for a VB .NET book now I'd be looking at these authors: Francesco Balena, Andrew Troelsen, John Connell, or Mike Snell.
Rating:
Summary: Good for the Beta but a little long in some chapters
Review: This is a pretty-good book if you base it on the Beta. The chapters on OOP (Chapters 4 - Classes and Objects and 5 - Inheritance and Interfaces) are very long. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 (Event Handling and Delegates)form the heart of this book, but I would have broken them down into smaller chapters. The information in those chapters provide a good introduction to OOP. At times, I felt the authors were hard to follow and found myself re-reading several pages especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall this book probably is about 3 1/2 stars. I am hoping that in the next release of this book that the authors would follow their own advice and break the chapters down into smaller parts. ...
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