Rating: 
Summary: Good Book!
Review: I am relatively new at OOP but this book helped me to write my very first VB.NET App and Service. It also has nice material on ADO.NET, ASP.NET & the .NET Framework in general. It has good samples and the reading was not too boring. It will not leave my library for some time.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy this book if you like technical writing...
Review: I chose and bought this book over dozen others because of its author, John Connell. His first book, Beginning Visual Basic 6 Databases, was a true gem and really helped me greatly in understanding and coding database programs.This book, however, has been a big disappointment. It is exhaustive, repetitive on theory, and short on hands-on coding techniques and examples. Most of us VB veterans already know the basics and are only interested in a concise summary of the differences and new features in VB.NET. so we can move on quickly and use it.
Rating:
Summary: Best Tips and Techniques around
Review: I have been promoting this book to my friends because it's the best .Net book I have found. While the other .Net books (and Ive read several for the past yr including C#) tend to repeat or say the same things in a differnet way - Connell sheds new light on .Net for the professional developer. For example, he discusses how to find things in the Framework using WinCV. Or not to use a short int (16 bit) because its actually slower because of current 32 bit CPU registers. Or how to use Option correctly. Or how to use .Net error messages to help find the data type you need. While this might not be a beginners first .Net book, clearly everyone will learn techniques and how to find your way around the framework. Oh, and it's simply the best explaination of ADO.NET and ASP.NET around. All in all, if you have to purchase one book - this is it. My copy is dog eared. There is even a cool .Net Artificial Intelligence program used to illustrate key concepts. And a Magic 8 Ball Web Service that I got up and running - and completely understand that new concept. It's not only well written and informative - but very fun to read. I hope Mr. Connell comes up with another .Net book soon.
Rating: 
Summary: Learning VB .Net
Review: I have found this book to be a pretty good introdution to VB .Net. It has a well written section on OOP. However, I have found numerous discrepancies in the book when doing the examples. It also makes references to things that probably happened in the Beta version (which was what was available at the time of publication) and don't happen now. A beginning programer will be confused by this and MS support site does not offer much assistance. Because of these issues I would not recommend this to a brand new programmer.
Rating:
Summary: My first review - this book deserves it.
Review: I manage a techincal group just getting started with .Net. While I have literally over a hundred technical programming books, I have never written a review before. The publisher got my money in exchange for some knowledge so I never found a need to take the time to write a review before - good or bad. But this book stands out in so many ways. I read it in four days and found myself returning to chapters on ADO.NET, Web Services, architecture, etc. I agree with the other reviewers giving this book 5 stars. If you want to not only learn VB.Net but understand it as well, I highly recommend Connels book. In fact, I just ordered the authors database book. This guy is good.
Rating:
Summary: .Net is actually pretty easy to learn
Review: I ordered Mr. Connell's book based on the number of excellent reviews. It's sort of a roll of the dice, but I was extremely impressed. I was a bit aprehensive about learning VB.Net but am now an advocate. This book shows how easy and powerful the framework is. Better yet - the framework is explained (how to find things, how to use it, etc.) in the clearest terms possible. IF you are a developer moving from classic VB you just can't go wrong here.
Rating:
Summary: Post purchase dissonance brought me back
Review: I read Coding Techniques and learned quite a bit, but have never written a book review before. Another reviewer of this book got my attention when he said the 286 happened in the 90's and not the 80's as the book claims. I'm old enough and seem to remember it in the 80's as well - a quick google search showed the 80286 released on Feb 1982 - 16 bits running at 12 mhz. Anyway, if a critique is going to be made, in my opinion it should be accurate. There is just too many not-so-good-quickly rushed to market books on the shelves. As a 20 yr programmer, I would recommend this as an excellent read. I've read several .Net books on both C# and VB - so far this is the best I've found.
Rating:
Summary: Above the .Net Noise
Review: I started reading VB.Net books when they started flooding the market with beta 1 last year. Most of them are me-too and a rehash of documentation. I saw this in a well known book store, paged through it, and purchased it on line. Mr. Connell's book is different in that he leads the reader through each chapter to show how each builds on the next using crafted code. Armed with what you just learned, you move to the next area - building on the previous knowledge. For example, he starts with Object Orientation -> Data Types -> Class Framework -> Error Handling -> Assemblies -> Windows Services -> ADO -> Datasets -> ASP -> Web Services -> Virtual Inheritance, etc. I have recommended this to my friends. IMHO iff you are going to buy a VB.Net book, you absoultely can't go wrong with Techniques.
Rating:
Summary: I would have given this 6 stars if possible
Review: I would not be surprised if this book is destined to become 'The book' to learn Visual Basic.Net. I completely agree with the other reviewers. John Connell leads the reader through .Net in such a clear and enjoyable way that you don't realize just how much you learned. After finishing a chapter, I close the book and reflect on all the ground that has been covered. The book logically leads the reader through assemblies, interned strings, structured error handling (i.e., try, catch, finally), classes, how to understand and quickly use the massive framework, OOP techniques, Web Services, Windows Services, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML, disconnected datasets, and much more. For me, these were pretty much completely new concepts - yet this book makes them crystal clear. I wish more books could be writting with this style of clearity and razer sharp examples. If you are trying to learn VB.Net, in my humble opinion you just can't go wrong with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Strong Content, Deplorable Editing
Review: I'm an experienced VB developer who, like everybody else, is looking for the best, quickest way to get up to speed on .NET. Connell's book contains a great deal of useful information, and is helpful in getting acquainted with the new IDE. However, I would not recommend it to someone learning to program for the first time, because the editing is simply atrocious. For example, figures displaying the code sample for how to do task X sometimes vary widely: in other words, figures supposedly referring to the same sample of code sometimes contain very different code, and there is nothing in the text of the chapter explaining why or even acknowledging the discrepancy. An experienced developer can recognize these as failures of the editing process during revisions of the examples (perhaps caused by releases of subsequent beta versions and then the RTM, perhaps just the result of the author changing his mind about how he wants to demonstrate a topic), but someone brand new to programming will be thrown for an awful loop as they try to make their code exactly match the author's. There are other problems with the writing and editing that also would be serious problems for a new programmer, so I would recommend this as a quite useful book, but only for experienced developers.
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