Designing Visual Basic .NET Applications

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to .NET
Review: A supurb introduction to .NET. Informative and enjoyable to read. Furthermore, in a tremendous burst of mental and physical agility, I was able to actually *open* the book in the store and observe that it doesn't have a lot of code examples (see previous "review"). It does however have a wealth of useful information, introducing the basics of both .NET, and Visual Basic .NET.

Rating:
Summary: What were you thinking?
Review: Here is a novel concept for a book: let's teach someone how to program in a language without code. Can it be done?

The answer, of course, is yes ... if you rely on the Visual Studio .NET IDE, which this book does. More than a book on coding, this book is a step by step on how to create code with the Visual Studio .NET IDE, without actually writing code.

This is not all bad, of course, as you can write some decent applications using this technique. However, it would have been nicer, if this was their intention, to include some screen shots. This book does not.

On the plus side, there is an awful lot of theory in this book. This alone may make this a useful addition to your library. If you want to really learn to code Visual Basic .NET, go elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: As good as the title says
Review: I am a VB 6.0 developer for quite a few years now and when the .NET framework kicked off I was a bit confused about the new way of developing .NET applications. I have read a few tutorials about the new technology and the new programing architecture but was still confused.
I found this book on the net and read the reviews, two positive two negative, still decided to buy it and I don't regreat it. It is worth the money.
It is true that the book has the minimum code needed for a programming book, but remember the title doesn't say "CODING VISUAL BASIC.NET APPLICATIONS". The title on the cover of this book is "DESIGNING VISUAL BASIC.NET APPLICATIONS". If you are an experienced programmer on any of the other languages you will now that the first step to creating a succesfull application is the designing stage. Then you go to coding. If you are one of those people that want to do the coding before the design then this is the wrong book.
If you are looking for a book that does both, designing and coding, then this book is not for you, then you have to look for a book that has at least 2500 pages, a CD-ROM included and of-course will cost like eight times this book.
But if you are looking for enough information to desing .NET applications and start thinking on the new way of developing for .NET then this is the right book for you.Autor goes deep on explaining the theory behind the .NET architecture, the need for migrating to .NET and gives you more then enough information about the new beast out there called .NET.
It helped me clear out a lot of things there were mixed on my head, being used to develop on VB 6.0.
If you are a serious developer and you read and learn, to learn and know then this book is one of the books that need to be in you bookshelf. Othervise by one of the books that say ".... VB.NET COMPLETE" read about all the possibilities of the new language but never learn any of them.
Offcourse this is not the book that will teach you everything. You need to buy some more books to learn the coding technologies. There is a lot of good books out there on coding like BIBLE series (Good for beginners), quite a few on the reusable objects and components, and at the very end you have the UNLEASHED series for the most serious developers. You will never find a book that references all the ends of programming. You have to buy a couple to get where you want and I think this is one of them.

Coriolis and Dave Vitter, thanks for this this title. Great Job.

Rating:
Summary: Not enough code, too much text
Review: I really dislike programming books that don't give me lots of good code samples but I can't recall one with as little code as this book. I am going to return it as a result.

Rating:
Summary: Better than these people say
Review: This book is about design and technique. There are lots of examples of how to do the right thing but the book doesn't deluge you with page after page of code samples. Instead they cut to the chase and show you just the portion of the code that makes a difference. This is a great book for anyone from beginner to moderately experienced VB program who is moving over to VB.Net and wants to learn how best to do it. I highly recommend this book.