Learning Visual Basic .Net

This book reinforces my good experience with the O'Reilly computer books. It gives a very good background for understanding object-oriented code -- in a structured and well-ordered approach. It starts as a primer, but rapidly builds, explaining the concepts well. Using console applications gives you a firm foundation for understanding the ideas. There's even some good humor along the way!

The book's back cover says that both seasoned programmers and new programmers will find the book useful - as a first time programmer, I agree. Syntax is discussed artfully, leaving more room for an exploration of concepts and practices - meaning that someone new to OOP will understand not only what to do but the best way to do it. Highly recommended for people ready to learn how to program.

Superb book, especially for people with good amount of VB6 experience. I myself have around 7 years of VB experience (started with VB 3 in college) and before stumbling upon this title, I tried the Sam's series and was greatly disppointed since such "beginner" books devote a great deal to the syntax, starting with how to open a project and draw a form ! This book wastes no such time in trivialities since it is assumed that as an experienced VB programmer, you already know all those things. In fact, only one chapter is devoted to the syntax and thereafter it builds on the OOP concepts. At the time of this writing, I have finished only half the book (till Structures) but from what I have experienced and understood so far, I don't think the author will let me down in the remainder of the book. In fact till this point, you don't even need the Visual Studio.Net IDE since you can happily type all the class examples in Notepad and run them from DOS prompt (Of course, you need to have the .Net framework installed, which again is a free download). So, if you're disappointed or bored by those 24 hour/21 day titles, run don't walk, to get this book !