MCAD/MCSD Visual Basic(r) .NET(tm) Windows(r) Applications Study Guide (Exam 70-306)

This is an excellent book to be used for your certification. It comes loaded with examples, exercises, exams, and plenty of explanations on the answers to the Self-tests on why they are correct AND why they were incorrect!One bad thing: You will need to watch the syntax on some of the exam watches and self-test question and answers. I highly recommend downloading the errata for this book before you start from [a website]. I have found a handful of important editing errors but they were pretty obvious. Other than the printing errors, which are very few IMO, this is a better cert book than [certain other] books!

I just passed 70-306. I attribute a great deal of my success to this book. It's comprehensive and nicely organized to help you build and retain what you need to know. They use a number of techniques to help you retain knowledge: Each chapter references what certification objective is being covered. There are frequent "Exam Watch" reminders - a one-sentence summary of a key point. Each chapter ends with around 10 test questions followed by well-done explanations on the right and wrong answers. Also, each chapter has a "two-minute drill" of key points and "Lab Questions". Many chapters have good code exercises, some, of which, are on the included CD, for those too lazy to type in the code. In addition the CD has a bunch of test questions that can be used many times as they are randomly generated. All these techniques give one a handful of ways to re-enforce the material.I agree with other reviewers that several chapters were not up to the standards of the rest of the book. The material is covered but not quite as good as most of the book - obviously done by different authors that the editor failed to make consistent. Also the test questions on the CD were not as tough as what I found on the actual test. Luckily, after conquering this book I signed up for the MeasureUp web site pretest questions. The combination worked very well for me; proof being I passed. Despite these criticisms I highly recommend this book to get the bulk of knowledge you need. Once you've conquered its material then use something like MeasureUp to fine-tune what you need to know. Overall, I was very pleased. As a point of reference, I'm a moderately experienced programmer, having worked with a number of languages over the years but am not strong on VB.

A good book overall considering the amount of information covered. It does cover just about everything needed for the test. Most of the book is well written with hands-on exercise, chapter quizzes, and chapter summaries. The sample exam on the accompanying CD is a nice bonus.A couple chapters seem to be clunky and thrown together. These chapters point to the accompanying CD for source code examples instead of listing them in the book like all other chapters. These same chapters seem not to offer much in the way of hands on exercises. Unfortunately these seem to be the more difficult topics. Fortunately these are only a couple out of over 20 chapters.If you work with VB.NET, then this book might be all you need to pass the 70-306.If you do not have much hand on experience with VB.NET you will find that you need to supplement your studying. If you just want to learn VB.NET then this is not the book for you.

This is a great book. I was very impressed at the level of depth and quality of examples used is this book. I recommend this book to people interested in both preparing for the exam and looking to get up to speed on VB .NET. There is a tremendous amount of valuable knowledge and information packed into this volume!

This is a great book that helped me pass the VB .NET exam for Windows apps, I really liked the walk-throughs, they focused on the HOW to pass the exam,Thank you.