This mighty tome presents an exhaustive treatment of Visual Basic .NET. This book is primarily aimed at seasoned Visual Basic programmers although I know a Java programmer that found it quite useful. Someone new to programming will find it overwhelming.

A wealth of code examples and best practices are presented as each new concept is presented. I particularly like the fact that Balena eschews in-line code in favor of code behind. As he says in real world applications this is what you are going to use.

Balena relates concepts so it is easier to understand and remember distinctions. For example, instead of explaining each web form control in isolation he explains controls in relationship to other controls. This helps enormously to remember what each control does because you are learning the differences between related controls as well as how each one functions.

It is great not to have to lug the book around because it is available to you in PDF form on a CD that comes with the book-I love using it on my notebook.

This book should be in the library of every serious VB .NET developer.

 

Not easy but a good book to learn from for experienced programmers. The author begins giving a rather complete rundown on the Visual Studio IDE, after all this is a book for developers and developers don't write meaningful applications in Notepad. The author does a good job explaining VB .NET and .NET Framework concepts and code examples abound. The code examples can be downloaded from http://www.samspublishing.com.

Overall I found the book useful and learned quite a bit. I especially liked the author's treatment of and emphasis on Refactoring. The chapter on Delegates and the chapter on Inheritance and Polymorphism were clearer to me and better explained than most other VB .NET books I have read. The author does especially well on explaining tough topics.

That being said there are, I believe, a few downsides to the book. First, the section on macros is introduced way too early and takes up way too much space; this section could have been skipped entirely. I feel the authors efforts would have been better spent adding more content to the section that covered VB .NET programming fundamentals. Second, the section on ASP.NET programming is too short--only 37 pages. Enough to whet your appetite but you'll need other books to be able to write web applications. Third, the section on reflection is introduced too early-before you write your first class. Despite its shortcomings the book is useful especially for the clear explanations of difficult subject areas.

 

This book has an interesting format-a topic, a highlighted sentence describing what you want to accomplish, a "Technique" (the how to code), "Comments" consisting of one or two paragraphs explaining the code and finally a "See Also" section pointing the reader to other relevant parts of the book, or other articles and websites for the given topic. This recipe format makes the book very concise and useful.

About 250 code snippets are presented in 23 chapters. This is exactly the kind of book one would like on a CD.  Unfortunately, the book does not come with one but the code is downloadable from http://aspalliance.com/cookbook.

As useful as it is the book is not without its drawbacks. The largest shortcoming, for me, was the lack of any graphics. You have to implement the code to see visually what it does. I would also have liked more commentary and explanations in some sections. For example, in the section "Sending an Email" the book says you need to configure relaying on your SMTP server before the email will send successfully but there's no indication of how you do this or pointer to an article or website that will tell you how to do this. Despite the book's noted shortcomings I have successfully used it a number of times and find it is a valuable addition to my library.