Learning Visual Basic .NET

Chapter 19. Afterword

Congratulations! If you’ve worked your way to this point in the book, you are now a VB.NET programmer. You should be very proud. Of course, no primer can cover everything there is to know about .NET programming, and you are not at the end, but rather at the beginning of your education. Nonetheless, you’ve made a very good start.

Where to Go from Here

I intentionally kept this book short to provide you with the fundamentals and not let more difficult topics distract you from the core elements of the language. Now that you’ve completed the book, however, you may be wondering where to go from here in your pursuit of .NET.

A wealth of information is available, both in books and online. The first task is to decide what you are interested in. Potential topics include:

• Advanced topics in VB.NET programming

• Web (ASP.NET) programming

• Windows (Windows Forms) programming

Sooner or later you’ll probably decide to read extensively on all three topics; the only question is which you tackle first. In the next sections, I’ll recommend some more advanced books to help you find your way through these topics.

Advanced Topics in VB.NET

If you decide that you want to understand all the nooks and crannies of VB.NET before going on to creating applications, you might consider reading a more advanced guide or a reference work on the language.

O’Reilly offers a few choices: Programming Visual Basic .NET is a more advanced book I am writing for release in early 2003, and VB.NET in a Nutshell ...