Programming VB .Net: A Guide for Experienced Programmers

The book is primarily designed for experienced Visual Basic developers making the transition to VB.NET. However, it can also be appreciated by other experienced programmers regardless of their programming background.The book begins with an introduction to the differences between VB.NET and VB. The next chapter introduces you to the new Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE). You will get a tour of the main windows, and learn how to compile and debug your VB.NET applications. Chapter three teaches the VB.NET syntax. You will learn the VB.NET expressions, operators, and program control flow. The next couple of chapters form the core of the book. These chapters cover object oriented programming and inheritance. VB.NET is the first truly object oriented programming version of VB, and a solid understanding of these new features is essential in taking full advantage of VB.NET's new powers.The next few chapters go on the cover important topics such as, event handling, error handling, building user interfaces, input/output streams, and multithreading. The final two chapters give a brief introduction to database access with VB.NET using ADO.NET, and a brief overview of ASP.NET.The book provides clear and complete coverage of all topics. It includes many real world code examples which help the reader to better understand all the concepts presented.

This book is a GUIDE for people with programming experience to using VB.NET. If you are an experienced VB developer, this book will be of GREAT use to you in converting. If you are a programming novice, the high speed approach used in this book will probably leave you unable to do much in terms of real programming. The explanations are so clear, that it may still be useful for a novice though. For people who are using other languages, and want to try their hand at VB, this is also probably very useful, especially if you know Java.Please note that this is NOT a complete how-to, nor do the authors attempt to infer that it is. It is just a rational explanation of the core bits of VB.NET and how the language has changed from VB5/VB6. In particular, their breakdown of the new totally OOP approach of VB is very good, although it may bore you a bit if you have a solid understanding of Java. In an hour with this book, I knew more about the new features/changes in VB than I did with two days of studying the docs from Microsoft.

I was looking forward to upgrading a few small applications that I've written in previous versions of VB to VB.NET, but wasn't sure exactly where to start. This book formed an excellent basis. Even if you've only had a little bit of experience with VB, you should find it to be an invaluable resource for learning the ins and outs of OO programming and VB.NET's implementation. The book provides very through coverage of most of the important concepts that real-world developers will need. It does move quickly through most topics (perhaps the reason for the "A Guide for Experienced Programmers"), but I found the pace to be perfect for me (although I'll be re-reading some sections soon). In fact, the only portion of the book that I found to be lacking was coverage of database access using ADO.NET. The book does provide a brief chapter on teh topic, but refers the reader to the documentation for more details. A little extra coverage here (especially since dealing with data sources is such an important topic for real-world developers) would have been helpful.I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to get an great basis of knowledge for working with VB.NET. Good luck!

The 3 chapters on OOP (Classes and Objects, Inheritance and Interfaces, and Event Handling and Delegates) are by far the clearest I have read on the subject. That goes for both text and example code, which are working! If only for these 3 chapters, which cover 40% of the 422 usable pages, it's worth the price of the book.Gary Cornell does state that these 3 chapters form the core of the book, and after reading this book and Dan Appleman's "Moving to VB.NET", I totally agree that developers "will find it extremely hard to take advantage of VB.NET's new powers" if they don't utilize OOP in VB.NET. Knowing, and being comfortable with, OOP makes it so much easier to develop solutions using VB.NET, and the .NET framework in general.I thought the 2 intro chapters on VB.NET IDE and "vocabulary" were informative and not boring, and that goes for the chapter on Multithreading.I would have liked to see a longer and more detailed treatment of Error Handling, and some "real" examples for the Windows Forms chapter.In "About This Book", the author set 3 objectives: a complete treatment of OOP in VB.NET, fundamentals of VB.NET techniques, and differences between VB.NET and earlier versions. He has succeeded in these 3 objectives!I will disagree though with the note on not assuming any knowledge of earlier versions of VB. Experienced VB5/6 programmers WITH some real C++ (OOP) experience will benefit the most from this book.

Cornell has always been one of my favorite writers on programming topics and this book doesn't dissapoint. (Interestingly enough, Jesse Liberty my other favorite writer on programming, has written a great C# book.) There is no question in my mind that this book currently is by far the best place to learn VB .NET if you have any programming experience at all. Note however that Cornell's book isn't comprehensive and it doesn't cover nearly as many topics as Wrox's "Professional VB .NET." so you might want to get a copy of that book for now.But what Cornell covers he generally covers in a far better manner and in much more detail than the Wrox book. (As I said in a previous review I found the Wrox book too variable from chapter to chapter to be ideal.) In particular, Cornell's chapters on OOP (especially the Inheritance and Interface chapter) are among the best I have ever seen on these topics. This is also the first book on VB .NET that I have seen that really covers multi-threading in any depth and I was happy to see that the chapter on Windows Forms covers basic printing! (A pet peeve of mine...). However, the downside to Corenll's book is that the chapters on ADO .NET and ASP .NET are only brief surveys and you pretty much have to (but you should anyway) turn to the excellent books "Teach Yourself ASP .NET in 21 Days" (Payne, Sams) and "Database Programming with VB NET" (Thomsen, Apress) for more information on these topics.