Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET review

Verdict:

Review Date: 20 Feb 2004

Price when reviewed:

Reviewed By: Mike James

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This is a standard introduction to Visual Basic .NET and its only real advantage is that it covers a lot of ground in its 700 pages.

Written by a team of authors led by Robert Oberg, it starts with a simple outline of .NET and Visual Basic .NET. As an introduction to Visual Basic, this is not suited to the complete beginner or the practised VB programmer. The beginner would find it too fast and technical and the advanced programmer would find it slow and plodding. There are lots of moderately realistic examples and if you are prepared to work through them you will learn something. However, there is no CD bound into the book and if you want to avoid typing the examples in you will have to download them from the website.

As well as a basic introduction to VB .NET, wider .NET issues are covered in its later parts: deployment, databases, ADO and ASP .NET. All these topics are well and systematically described, but the authors hardly deviate from the standard documentation. They don't dig into it to discover any shortcomings or clever ways of doing things. The result is rather dull.

If you want a huge book that expands on the standard documentation and provides examples then you might want to add this to your collection. However, if you are happy to read the supplied documentation and apply it in a reasonably obvious way you would probably do better to save the money for a more useful book.

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