This newest programming guide by bestselling author Jesse Liberty isn't your typical Visual Basic book. It's not a primer on the language, and it won't dull your brain with arguments hyping .NET either. Its goal, rather, is to make you immediately productive, creating Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

Written for VB6 and novice programmers, the book shows how Visual Basic 2005 can be used to rapidly build modern Windows and web applications.

What makes this book different is what's not included. There's no introduction to Visual Basic, no explanation of how it fits into the .NET world. Why waste time reading about something you'll learn for yourself as soon as you start creating applications? You won't even write a "Hello World" program. With Programming Visual Basic 2005 you'll get started building something meaningful, right away.

The book is divided into three parts--Building Windows Applications, Building Web Applications, and Programming with Visual Basic--each of which could be a book on its own. The author shares his thorough understanding of the subject matter through lucid explanations and intelligently designed lessons that guide you to increasing levels of expertise. By the time you've finished the book, you'll know how to program both Windows and web applications with VB 2005.

The support for this book extends beyond its covers. Jesse offers a FAQ, Errata, complete source code and a link to a free private support discussion center on his web site: LibertyAssociates.com - just click on books.

Jesse Liberty, Microsoft .NET MVP, is the best-selling author of O'Reilly Media's Programming ASP.NET and over a dozen other books on web and object-oriented programming. Jesse is a frequent contributor to many industry publications and websites, and has spoken at numerous industry events. He is a former Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T and Vice President for technology development at CitiBank.

Jesse Liberty's books have successfully guided thousands of programmers into the world of .NET programming, and Programming Visual Basic 2005 is no exception.

Programming Visual Basic 2005,  December 08 2005
Submitted by Anonymous Reader   [Respond | View]

Oh Please, please take the time to explain why things DON'T work in the samples of this book.

Even if intentional, a brief description of why databases wont update with your code, why there are concurrency issues, methods are "one-time executed", so on, so on.

Even Cut and pasteing code results in interesting "gotcha's" not described in the text as the book progresses!!

Generaly, I consider these things typical; and usually programmer error rather than bad code, but the code in this book just falls flat on it's own!

Dang! Good info to a certain degree -- but all ends there.


Programming Visual Basic 2005,  December 06 2005
Submitted by Gary Gibbons   [Respond | View]

I've been working through the first 2 chapters of this book for about a week, and although most of the information is fairly straight forward, there are some issues that do not make the cut with the cross over to the release version of VS/VB 2005.

The end of chapter 2 has the reader change button event handlers to deal with a collection of buttons. The idea being to choose a button relationship pragmatically, then open a new form with the data result via one event handler method -- a great idea --
unfortunately, this does not work cleanly (or as it is written).


The original click events presented in the text provide the desired results via their individual handlers, while the collection of buttons into one event handler does not. But as the author states: "having code nearly identical for 2 different methods should send a shudder down your spine" (chapter 2, sub sec 2.2.5).

Sure will, but this code seems to be lacking proper explanation, and fails to render the selected data, only posting from the 1st position of the data set.

OK, not so difficult to resolve, but for a newbie? Have fun.

In spite of good information, this book is not for newbies or beginners. As a matter of fact, as a tutorial this book should be aimed at intermediate level coders just opening the new VS 2005 IDE looking to get started.

The discussion presents a lot of information, but confuses the picture with references to previous content, and unclear step - by - step instructions that rely on barely readable gif screen-shots to make critical points; IE: a screen shot shows a cursor poised over a dataset binding source, but the image is unintelligible, and the text does not say which binding source to choose. So if you can figure it out, you will be fine!

Clearly, this was written ahead of the release of products it was intended for, and probably will suffer because of that issue alone. But seems to be a reasonable contribution.

Advice: wait for a title that follows the product release, rather than precedes!

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