Rating: 
Summary: Makes the complex easy.
Review: I've been programming in VB from version 3 through 6 and really haven't done much with objects, so was a bit concerned about learning VB.Net (where everything is an object). I had difficulty with C++ in this regard. I just received Coding Techniques for VB.Net and can't put it down. While the book provides all sorts of expert techniques, it conveys the information in a clear and easy to follow manner. After two days I've already built several .Net programs and have all sorts of ideas for many more. The section on Artifical Intelligence using the .Net Eliza program is fantastic. The ADO.Net and Web Services sections are just plain fun to read. I highly recommend this Microsoft book.
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Summary: This book will do it.
Review: If you want to learn VB.Net - this book will do it.
Rating: 
Summary: For vb programmer beginner with lot of money to spend
Review: Le titre de ce livre ne convient tout simplement pas. En achetant ce livre, je m'attendais à ce que le contenu soit avancé. Habituellement, lorsque l'on est rendu au point d'apprendre des techniques de codage, on a pas besoin de savoir ce qu'un integer ou d'avoir un exemple de programmation orientée objet avec une classe de 1 méthode et 2 propriétés. Enfin bref, un autre livre sur lequel on peut dire qu'on apprends rien d'autre que des petits trucs simple et faciles à trouver sur Internet gratuitement. En plus, le livre coûte bien trops cher. Je ne pouvais pas mettre 0/5 alors je me suis contenté de mettre 1 étoile.
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Summary: Your Second .net Book
Review: One of the trivial but irritating problems with this book is that the author and the publisher seem to be unclear about who the target audience for this book is.The back of the book says that 'whether you are a beginner or a self taught programmer,a professional looking for a refresher n coding techniques ,or a programmer coming from another language ,this is the VB book for you.'Now in the second para of the book's introduction the author says that 'This book was written for visual basic programmers by a visual basic programmer'.Though the title of the book suggests that the book is meant for atleast intermediate programmer's in VB rather than a beginner the author at some places seem to be targeting a complete beginner.His explanation about why one should use a property procedure instead of a variable to prevent invalid values for classes seems to be absurd.Propety procedure are a very much part of VB6 and I am sure that no programmer moving on to .net from VB6 needs any explanation about the benfits of using property procedures over private variables. Overall I would still recommend this book simply becoz it's a good one.Some of the topics covered ar quite advanced and will cater to people who have finished reading books like Programming MS Visual basic.net by Francesco Balena.
This book essentially should be your second book on Visual basic.net , the one you should read after say the Balena Book
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Summary: Use This Book Carefully
Review: Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
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Summary: A great sequel to the beginner books
Review: The author eases the reader into intermediate topics, which are carefully explained. I highly recommend this book to people who have thoroughly completed books like Visual Basic .NET Step by Step.
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Summary: Padded his Resume?
Review: The book is a pretty good transition from VB6 to VB.NET, but the author either lied about having used VB6, or wasn't as knowledgeable about it as he thinks he is. I am constantly shaking my head as he makes statements about VB6 that are just not true. More distrubing, though, are the cases where his VB6 knowledge is not tempered with any experience. For example, he states that a variable declared AS NEW isn't actually instantiated until it is used. This is true. But any VB programmer worth his pay knows that you don't use AS NEW, but instead instantiate the object later in your code when you actually need the variable. While it does a decent job providing an overview of VB.NET, I am left wondering if the techniques I am learning are really the best, or even acceptable, given the fact that this supposed "expert" on VB6 does not display expert knowledge of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Yassine
Review: The Book is good, give a good intro to vb.net but those interested more in the language should dig deeper Msdn, Blogs, Compiler Spec, etc.
There is one thing though I disliked and hope it will be taken care of by Mspress, the problem is the Code Samples that obviously requires correction and shoulb be taken care of Asap.
I am aware of the Kb article published on Microsoft site, still not enough.
Other than that, great book and you can clearly sense from John's writing that he is a teacher and a good one as well. Hope this review would help one or more Vb Developer and that my message passed as well to the right Folks Yassine
Regards
Rating:
Summary: A good intermediate book
Review: The book is well written and the author has done a great job to keep everything simple to understand even though he's talking about OOP! You'll get a good overview of things you can do with VB.NET, illustrated with good examples. Unfortunately, there is also many little technical mistakes in this book. Most of them might have been caused by the changes between the beta and release version of VB.NET but I have been disapointed to find so many of them! I thought that a book with the name Microsoft on it would be more accurate... It's not the case!
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Summary: The title should have been "Dot Net made easy"
Review: This book tries to cover .Net, and does an excellent job. Some areas are covered more in depth than others, but this contains the best explaination of object oriented programming to the VB'er that I've ever seen. The expansive framework is then examined showing clearly how to find and use this powerful tool. File IO and Web Services are also very nicely covered, with a full 3 chapters on the new ADO.NET. I think what I like most is that it's clear this book was layed out in an expert fashion. Each chapt builds on the next, and before I knew it VB.Net seemed like an old friend. The writing style is crisp, and ancellary pieces of info are presented to show how each new element of .Net not only fits into the whole, but how each is used in real world examples. He provides gems such as why never to use the new short integer (16 bit) because the cpu registers are 32 bit. Most professional programmers automatically try to use the smallest data type for the job, but in this case selecting a short would actually add cycles to pad the other 16 bits. I have not seen pro tips like this anywhere else. I did read Connell's previous database book (which is dog eared on my shelf), and was also pleasantly surprised with this one. This is the first review I have ever written for any book - but felt this book stands above the other .Net books I've read so would take the time.
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