Professional VB 2005

This book gets down into the guts of VB 2005 and gives you an up close view of the inner workings of the .NET platform focusing specifically on VB. Every detail is covered. For the most part, real world scenarios are not given in this book. The authors prefer to keep it generic and will tend to focus on the mechanics of the language. This book is definitely for higher level programmers who do not yet know VB very well. Beginners will get lost quickly. This book is not for the casual reader. This is a college style textbook that requires your full attention, and portions of it need to be read more than once. Overall, when you finish, you will have an in depth knowledge of VB 2005.

This book could probably be used by the beginning VB programmer if they are at least familar with the basic concepts of programming. But it is really intended for those who have used VB before. This book concentrates on the changes in VB 2005 with special regard for its integration as part of the .NET environment. The book uses Visual Studio 2005, the integrated development environment that makes the writing of VB programs much easier. The big changes in VB 2005 and the .NET environment is that most tasks take far less code to implement. This combined with the leap to VB becoming an object-oriented language has extended its ability to be used to code more extensive enterprise applications. Shipping as part of Visual Studio 2005 Microsoft includes ASP.NET which is also covered here as part of the use of VB in programming for web sites. Other web oriented subjects included here include an introduction to XML which is used with the web to facilitate machine to machine communications. This is changing the very concept of the web where the data the site displays to a user may come from other machines literally anywhere in the world. At almost 1200 pages, there's a lot of material here. It's well written, and covers just about everything you'd want to know about VB. I found a few small errors, but no real problems.