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Mastering Visual Basic .NET
by Evangelos Petroutsos
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Sybex (2001-12-05)
ISBN: 0782128777
EAN: 9780782128772
UPC: 025211228777
Dewy Decimal #: 005.2768
Paperback: 1200 pages
SKU: 00-LKLT-0FFW
Condition: Acceptable
Comments: Text is unmarked. CD included. Cover shows wear. Still very usable.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Visual Basic .NET is much more than an update of VB 6: It's now a fully object-oriented language that takes advantage of Microsoft's new, feature-rich .NET framework. Mastering Visual Basic .NET is a comprehensive treatment of the language and the framework, from the beginning steps to advanced application development. You'll find detailed tutorials combined with practical, real-world projects and a vast amount of reference material to get you up and running with VB .NET in no time. To shorten the learning curve for experienced VB 6 programmers, this book contains dozens of special notes describing the differences between the old and the new ways of doing things. Mastering Visual Basic .NET thoroughly covers the development environment, language elements, object-oriented programming, and the .NET framework, along with such advanced topics as database programming and web programming. It's everything you need to become a VB .NET expert.
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Customer Reviews
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Great Book - Poor Coding Style
Rating  (3)
Date: 2005-09-04
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
The book is great once you know your way around. However, the coding style is very poor. It looks more like code for VB6ers who are too dumb or too lazy to switch to .NET but want to use it anyway to get rid of the "Wanna-be coder" attribute. VB has grown, but unfortunately, some authors haven't. I prefer books from authors who can pick up changes quicker than that.
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Not for beginners, not for experts.
Rating (3)
Date: 2005-03-01
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
I'm an intermediate programmer having worked sporadically in a variety of Object Oriented languages (Java, C++ etc.). I have to ramp up very quickly in order to do a VB.NET app, and bought this book for two reason. First: I wanted to gain a quick familiarity with the Visual Studio IDE, which I had never used before. I also needed a quick primer on the syntax and functionality of VB.NET.
On the first score--understanding the IDE--the book did a fine job of quickly getting me up and running with the basics. That was a few hours of work.
On the second score, I found this book to be alternately easy going and profoundly infuriating. Petroutsos' writing style is fluid and colloquial, essentially talking through many of the basics of the language. As a non-beginner, this served me well. I was able to read through chapters such as the overview of the VB language, quickly identifying areas which I understood from previous programming experience.
However, that easy-going writing style seems to lead to an absolutely unforgivable lack of attention to structure, rigor and detail. Despite much of the book being conceptually familiar, several areas were brand new to me. In the area concerning variable scope, Petroutsos introduces the idea of module level scope without defining a module or explaining what it is. Frustrated, I consulted the Contents and the Index but was unable to find any other place in the book where a module was discussed. Eventually, I pretty much got it through context in other chapters (and a background in OOP). I can't imagine how someone who wasn't already intimately familiar with OOP would fare trying to get through such a concept.
This book also doesn't do much hand-holding through the construction of the code samples, often leaving the reader on his/her own in assembling the code and figuring out what each line/routine does. Again, fine for an experienced programmer--not so fine for a beginner.
And this book is just rife with oversights such as these. This book is clearly targeted at relative beginners (if not absolute beginners) as it explains concepts which are familiar to all programmers (i.e. what is a variable?). And yet I can't imagine a beginner who wouldn't be very frustrated trying to figure out what the Petroutsos merely glosses over.
Finally, the editing of this book is horrible. While the prosaic style generally reads well, the author often re-states the same explanations several times within a chapter. It's clear that this is not for emphasis (since it doesn't read that way) but bad editing. A good editor will strip out such redundancy and help make a much more concise book.
Ultimately, this book served its purpose: a quick primer on a new software platform. I got what I needed out of it. However it was frustrating at times for the reasons I mentioned above. It doesn't succeed as a beginner's learning tool, nor can I imagine that it would succeed well as instructioin on advanced programming techniques.
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Easy to understand. Great for beginners
Rating  (5)
Date: 2004-11-15
Unlike so many programming books this one is relatively easy to understand. Even if you don't have any programming experience. Unfortunately, examples contain some errors. Nevertheless, one of the best books for beginners.
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The good, the bad, and the beautiful
Rating  (4)
Date: 2004-07-08
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is an excellent book for beginners or intermediate programmers.
Good points:
This book explains subjects that most other books on VB .Net ignore. If you are considering buying any other book on the dot net environment, look in its index and see if it covers FileStream, ArrayList, SortedList. Most do not cover these, but Petroutsos's book does and they really simplify life. They add to the power of your programs and cut down on the amount of work you have to do. This book has a lot of other similar features of the environment that other books skip. Bad points:
I am appalled by the number of errors in the programming examples and descriptions. Be aware that when he writes "to the right" he often means "to the left" and vice-versa. Be aware that he likes to declare variables that do absolutely nothing in his code segments: they are declared, they use up memory, and the program never refers to them after they are declared. Be aware that the code given in the book does not always conform to the code sample in the CD that accompanies the book.
There iss an errata sheet for the text on the Sybex web, but I have never succeeded in getting them to correct errors I point out to them. Conclusions:
You can overcome the bad points above so they are minor speed bumps, however annoying. What you cannot do is find a better text for learning the basics of .Net and also learn to use the tools that make you never want to go back to VB Version 6..
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Excellent book. as an introduction to Visual Basic.Net
Rating (5)
Date: 2003-09-14
This is really an excellent book if you want a very good introduction to the basics of Visual Basic.Net. The book is good read, good examples, very comprehensive. If you are want to start with Visual BAsic.Net, GET THIS BOOK.
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