Rating: 
Summary: A good 70-306 study guide
Review: A good book overall considering the amount of information covered. It does cover just about everything needed for the test. Most of the book is well written with hands-on exercise, chapter quizzes, and chapter summaries. The sample exam on the accompanying CD is a nice bonus.A couple chapters seem to be clunky and thrown together. These chapters point to the accompanying CD for source code examples instead of listing them in the book like all other chapters. These same chapters seem not to offer much in the way of hands on exercises. Unfortunately these seem to be the more difficult topics. Fortunately these are only a couple out of over 20 chapters. If you work with VB.NET, then this book might be all you need to pass the 70-306. If you do not have much hand on experience with VB.NET you will find that you need to supplement your studying. If you just want to learn VB.NET then this is not the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Une très belle présentation, mais il manque des exemples...
Review: C'est un livre très intéressant qui m'a permit de décourvrir certaines facettes de visual basic.net que je n'avais jamais travaillé, mais le gros défaut de ce livre réside dans un très grand nombre d'exemples dont l'auteur fait des références et qui sont inexistants sur le CD. Il va de soit que cela est très difficile de comprendre un exemple sans voir le code. Enfin, malgré tout, c'est un très bon livre pour la préparation à l'examen.
Rating: 
Summary: Not good..........
Review: First off, this book starts off pretty good with covering the exam topics. As you go farther into the book you will notice that the author does what most author do when writing certification books, they don't provide enought information. The CD that was included with my book didn't have the examples for chapters 13 - 16, so I am now changing to the examcram2 books.
Everyone should......................
Rating:
Summary: A great book for preparing for 70-306
Review: I just passed 70-306. I attribute a great deal of my success to this book. It's comprehensive and nicely organized to help you build and retain what you need to know. They use a number of techniques to help you retain knowledge: Each chapter references what certification objective is being covered. There are frequent "Exam Watch" reminders - a one-sentence summary of a key point. Each chapter ends with around 10 test questions followed by well-done explanations on the right and wrong answers. Also, each chapter has a "two-minute drill" of key points and "Lab Questions". Many chapters have good code exercises, some, of which, are on the included CD, for those too lazy to type in the code. In addition the CD has a bunch of test questions that can be used many times as they are randomly generated. All these techniques give one a handful of ways to re-enforce the material.
I agree with other reviewers that several chapters were not up to the standards of the rest of the book. The material is covered but not quite as good as most of the book - obviously done by different authors that the editor failed to make consistent. Also the test questions on the CD were not as tough as what I found on the actual test. Luckily, after conquering this book I signed up for the MeasureUp web site pretest questions. The combination worked very well for me; proof being I passed.
Despite these criticisms I highly recommend this book to get the bulk of knowledge you need. Once you've conquered its material then use something like MeasureUp to fine-tune what you need to know. Overall, I was very pleased. As a point of reference, I'm a moderately experienced programmer, having worked with a number of languages over the years but am not strong on VB.
Rating: 
Summary: Great intro to VB.Net but poor certification prep
Review: If you are new to Visual Basic.Net then this book is great for getting a basic understanding of the language. If you are using it to introduce yourself to the language then I would highly recommend it. However, this book miserably fails its' title in preparing for the 70-306 exam. The best thing the book does is to provide you an outline of what to study for the exam but you will need to do further research on the topics with MSDN. Plus, as other reviewers have stated, there are a few errors throughout the book most notably on the practice tests. But, for an intro study I would not let the errors turn you away from it. The bottom line is the book is not detailed enough for the exam but a good introduction, especially, for college students taking a VB.Net course.
Rating:
Summary: Great intro to VB.Net but poor certification prep
Review: If you are new to Visual Basic.Net then this book is great for getting a basic understanding of the language. If you are using it to introduce yourself to the language then I would highly recommend it. However, this book miserably fails its' title in preparing for the 70-306 exam. The best thing the book does is to provide you an outline of what to study for the exam but you will need to do further research on the topics with MSDN. Plus, as other reviewers have stated, there are a few errors throughout the book most notably on the practice tests. But, for an intro study I would not let the errors turn you away from it. The bottom line is the book is not detailed enough for the exam but a good introduction, especially, for college students taking a VB.Net course.
Rating:
Summary: There a much better books available
Review: It's obvious why this book was the first VB.NET book available. The book was obviously rushed, has many typos, pieces of code that doesn't work, and questions with wrong answers. The content of this title isn't anywhere near the quality of the study guide by Gunderloy. This book is a decent start for beginners, but if you really want to learn and pass the test, look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: There a much better books available
Review: It's obvious why this book was the first VB.NET book available. The book was obviously rushed, has many typos, pieces of code that doesn't work, and questions with wrong answers. The content of this title isn't anywhere near the quality of the study guide by Gunderloy. This book is a decent start for beginners, but if you really want to learn and pass the test, look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Good. But falls short
Review: Okay this book gave me lots of confidence. But that is only because it didn't cover a lot of involved topics which are required for 70-306. After reading this book cover to cover, and scoring a consistent 80% plus in it's questions, I looked at braindumps etc, and got only 50-70%. I am still not confident of clearing 70-306, I need to reinforce what this book taught me with a tougher book.
#2, two chapters are ultra lame because they expect you to carry the damned cd with you for source code. I bought the book, have a heart and print the source code ... Those two chapters are holes in my knowledge just because I could not refresh my knowledge with actual code, as I was reading it .. it is more important than you think it is.
Rating:
Summary: 80% Fantastic
Review: The book was great, except for about 20%. I don't know which of the four authors wrote those chapters, but although the content was good, they got lazy and stop putting important code examples into the book (they would give you some file to look at on the CD). ... this was extremely frustrating because it meant to see the code (and the code was important to view) you had to go load up the accompanying CD. I found this extremely annoying because almost all my reading is done away from the office and away from my computer. Other than that sad fact, the book was awesome.
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