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5 comments about Beginning Visual Basic 5.

1. This is one of the best Beginner's Teach Yourself type books on a programming language that I've ever read. It's pitched at just the right level for an absolute beginner but at the same time the author manages not to be patronizing. I like the chatty style, and the way only one new concept at a time is introduced so that I wasn't overwhelmed by too much new information at once. I found I could just about read straight through the book without having to flip back and forth looking up things I'd forgotten or didn't understand.

   Although this is not supposed to be a complete reference to the language, it could do with a fuller index. It's a great way to get to grips with the basics (pardon the pun) of the language. I'd recommend it as a means of understanding this sort of event-driven language, particularly for programmers who are familiar with only 'non-visual' languages such as Pascal, C, etc. You'll also need a more comprehensive guide and/or reference manual to become fully conversant in the language.




2. Many errors were not on the publisher's site. If you are going to write a book, please make sure the code works. Try using it! Am I being unreasonable?



3. I'm in a class which uses this book as it's primary text. We have problems in some of the code exercises. Some of the code in the book just doesn't work and it gets really aggrivating dealing with it. Additionally, features and functions are incorporated without first explaining them to the reader. Overall this is not a very good book to learn from. I personally had to purchase additional materials to better learn the material.



4. This is a great book for beginners. I found Peter Wright's easy going style of writing to be refreshing. This book covers a bit more ground than most "beginner books" therefore you will gain a solid understanding of the language.



5. This is the perfect book for self-study and for anyone interested in learning vb with little or no programming experience. The author introduces us to the fundamental concepts of vb and hand guide us to implementing useful vb applications without overwhelming readers with too much information at one time. each concept, each section is written with extreme clarity and gently eases readers to the world of vb. by the end of the book, readers are ready to creating powerful vb applications with a solid understanding of the vb language.Beginning Visual Basic 5 is without a doubt, *the* best introductory book to learning vb. you might want to get Core Visual Basic 5 as your second book for more advanced coverage. good luck!

No comments about Advanced Visual Basic.Net (3rd Edition).

5 comments about Learn to Program Visual Basic Examples (Miscellaneous).

1. I purchased this book and the Learn to Program Visual Basic 6 together as a package deal. These were some of the earliest books that I purchased while I was trying to learn Visual Basic 6.0. Both of these books are good for the beginner or for developers coming from either an earlier version of Visual Basic or another language. This book is made to augment the Learn to Program Visual Basic 6.0 book. You should read most of that book before attempting to read this book. This book targets specific examples of how-to-do things in Visual Basic.



2. Simple to follow and examples of how newbies would do
   something (that didn't work) and what was wrong, and then an example of it
   done correct...

   This book finally made things click...
   REALLY 'THE TURNING POINT' in my self-studies!

   Written as if it were a detailed record of a call-in Visual Basic help show.

   I suggest those trying to learn VB get this and all of John Smiley's books on the subject (I own them all!)

   Tony!




3. This text book is laid out in a very relaxing format, unlike so many text books that leave you tense after studying them.
   The book is a "talk show", question and answer format. John Smiley answers each "callers'" question with detailed examples and references to topics already learned or covered if they relate. I would highly recommend this textbook.



4. The book is basically a dialogue from the author's class on visual basic databases. I found this writing style to be very annoying and not easy to follow. The whole book is centered around one project and presents a narrow viewpoint rather than the more comprehensive approach to database design I was looking for.



5. When I made the decision to get serious about learning Visual Basic I was glad I happened across this book. Although I found the cable T.V. question / answer format a bit much, I had to admit that it was a unique and novel approach to teaching a subject as vanilla as VB programming.
   
   This book is more than wordy. It could have easily been written in half the space. But then again, the author demonstrates a teaching style that is what I consider painfully patient. Although my learning style is more of a "get to the point" bullet point orientation, I acknowledge that many, many people may find his detailed coverage of even the minutest aspect of programming to be extremely valuable.
   
   That said, you do indeed get 100 pretty neat ideas on how to solve some common coding problems that a beginning to intermediate programmer will find helpful. I use his techniques in my own applications for things such as preventing a second instance of my program from running, determining if a file exists, figuring out why executable files won't run on distributed machines, and a number of others.
   
   Many of the code examples were of things I already knew how to do. However, it's always nice to read another approach and possibly discover a more efficient or even more reliable way of accomplishing the same thing.
   
   This book is definitely for the beginner VB6 programmer. If you're just learning and want 100 or so clear-cut examples of how to perform some of the more "basic" tasks in Visual Basic 6, then this is a good place to get a few really good ideas. If you're looking for a more advanced treatment of VB6, then this book is not for you. Otherwise, it's a good investment, but I rate it four stars for wordiness.

5 comments about OOP: Building Reusable Components with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (Visual Basic.Net).

1. This book is now required by my development staff to read before developing .NET applications. The first is "Practical Standards for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET". This book picks up where the other has left off.

   There are hundreds of ways to develop software, but Spencer, Eberhard and Alexander have done a great job illustrating one approach that is very practical for an enterprise enviroment. This book shows goes over many of the steps in software development and how to design the many tiers using .NET inheritance and reusing of code.

   My company name is Wharton Computer Consulting and we have been developing software for nearly a decade. I have read over a hundred technical books and have over 20 Microsoft Certifications. This book will allow me to spend less time going over how code should be done. During my technical reviews I will be able to point to chapters in this book on how it should be done.

   I have also taught at several university's and this will now be my recommended book for students interested in learning how to develop using .NET.




2. I have only read 9 books related to vb.net and most of them seem to be a copy of the MSDN library. This book is underrated but I found this book to be precise what I needed. It gives real world solutions, exploiting many of the .NET framework classes. While in other books only two or three chapters are of value this book is withinh the TOP on my list. This book is different because you are creating a full enterprise application, building different classes with specific purposes and then putting it together to have an End-product. It is this putting together that will help you understand the potentials of VB.NET



3. The .Net framework is huge. After professionally developing several web projects I had the nuts and bolts pretty much nailed. However, putting it all together into a sound model/approach is tough.

   I wish I'd read this book earlier on because it would have saved me a lot of pain. After you're past the novice stage and have a handle on the VB.Net syntax and object model, this book is the next step. It contains lots of code snippets and you can download their entire code library used to build the sample apps but the real key here is learning a sound methology.

   One review was critical of their approach. I disagree with his comments. This book offers not only a sound approach to application design using .Net (with some concentration on web development), n-tier architecture is accepted practice. The book offers a sound VB.Net implementation. Of course, it's hardly the only way and is a tad simplistic for the real world intranet apps I'm working on. But it should help intermediate programmers put it all together to move to the next level.

   My only complaint is that I wish it contained more code details, some broader coverage, and was more advanced. But that's a personal gripe because by the time I'd picked this up I'd personally grown past its content through the school of hard knocks.




4. Well, if you have absolutely NO experience with OOP and were looking for a good book to help you learn it . . . don't get this. :P

   I think most of the practices in this book are poor. For example, and this is simply personaly opinion, there is a section on using a data access layer that they wrote (I think it stinks). Hardly a very good DAL in my opinion. The thing I don't like about it is when they tell you to use it from other layers, you still have to know about this concept of SQLServer, connection strings, stored procedures, and parameters, and that is just lame. When I write a DAL, I abstract that stuff out. How in the world would I cleanly swap my DAL out if I wanted to go from SQL Server to Oracle?! Well, using their techniques it seems that I would have to go through the code in my other layers and change quite a bit . . . Horrible!

   Then, when they talk about using a security layer, they say this: "Our first thought was to create the security layer and have ASP.NET developers simply place code to check the login status at the top of each page. This approach is fraught with problems because it places the responsibility on the developer to work out the security on each page and include it." So, what do they do 2 paragraphs later? Tell you to put this header control that will handle it into EVERY page: "All the developer needs to do is put the header on the page and the page is secure." Big deal, they abstract the security into one component, and then call that from this header. But the developer still needs to stick it in every page . . . (I personally would have used inheritence for this, but whatever works.)

   All in all, I think this book is about 5% useful. Seems like a good article would have accomplished the same goal, I don't see that this book has much valuable information. Thankfully I didn't pay for it, just read it via O'Reilly's Safari Subscription service!




5. I found this book was very easy reading. The ASP.Net server controls are very good. I also use the Data Layer in all of my .Net applications. It's very solid code. Simply a great a read.

No comments about Accelerated VB 2005 (Accelerated).

No comments about Visual Basic Animation Graphics Programming/Book and Disk.

5 comments about Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library (Kaleidoscope).

1. I found this book to be a handy 2nd book to have on .NET programming... it doesn't have much content to help you make the transition to .NET (I'd have to recommend Gary Cornell's Programming VB .NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers for that task), but it does do a great job of helping you find the right class libraries and write code with them once you are up and running with your language of choice.

   Each chapter is focused on a namespace. The authors then spend a few pages bringing people up to speed on the spotlight technology (I am new to XML and particularly liked the intro to XML piece). Then they dive right into the details of using the .NET classes to achieve your desired end-result. The class library that ships with .NET is huge, and I found it helpful to use this book as a guide to highlight the classes I should worry about to get 80-90% of my programming work done.

   Now for the cons: the sample applications could have been a bit more in-depth, and I really think they should have spent the time to make the book "bi-lingual" by providing some C# code as well - but overall, a great addition to your .NET bookshelf.




2. Because of a project, I needed to finally make the jump from VB6 to VB.NET. After reviewig several books, I grabbed the book by Powers and Snell. It helped tremendously on the key pieces of my project. What I really like are the numerous code examples - worth the price of the book alone! I even contacted the authors to get their thoughts on something and ask a few questions. Not only did they reply with great answers, but their indepth knowledge of .NET helped finalize an important part of my project architecture. Looking forward to more titles by Powers and Snell. Thanks again guys!



3. The challenge for a reference book like this is to be better the documentation that Microsoft provide - MSDN and the .Net framework SDK. My experience is that this book certainly achieves that.

   For example, today I needed to show the "save file" dialog and then write the contents of a text box to a text file. I know how to do that in VB6, but I hadn't done it in VB.Net before. I searched MSDN which gave me accurate descriptions of the menthods and properties of at least four classes for writing data to files, but I still had no idea which one(s) I needed to use.

   I am sure the sample code I needed is somewhere in MSDN, but I hadn't found it after 20 minutes searching when I gave up and referred to this book. In five minutes I had found what I was after, my code worked and I was able to get on with my next task. That is what this book is for. If you want to learn about the new programming features in VB.Net (like polymorphism, delegates etc) this is not your book. But if you want help getting your .Net program to talk to anything (files, printers, active directory, browsers, TCP/IP Sockets, XML/XSLT or whatever) This book will be a valuable resource.

   Just note that while this book covers ASP.Net and ADO.Net, if you work with these a lot you might want more depth than is provided here. I will be considering the Wrox "ASP.Net Namespace Reference" when it is released.




4. Visual Basic experts Lars Powers and Mike Snell effective collaborate in the Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library to instruct intermediat to advanced level users on a full range of issues including: delineating and define the pieces of .NET; explaining how/why .NET was conceived and what this means to VB6/Windows DNA developers; how to execute Windows programming using the .NET namespaces; position the .NET namespaces within the context of the reader's project; how to make architecture decisions when using .NET namespaces; as well as details about the construction of Web Services and how they programmatically communicate with each other. Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library is enhanced further with call-outs and highlighted sections will illustrate concepts by relating previous VB6/Windows DNA best practices with the new .NET approach. 1152 pages. User Level: Intermediate-Advanced. Highly Recommended.



5. BUt why do VB when c# is just as easy and you can write unmanaged within it. Its just a no brainer with all the limitations of VB still.

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