Visual Basic .Net Power Coding

This book is awesome. It is exactly what I have been looking for. I have been coding in VB.Net for a couple years now and I'm comfortable with the standard features of VB.Net and Visual Studio.Net. I needed a book that would take my skills to the next level and help me take full advantage of the more powerful capabilites of the .Net programming environment. Make no mistake, this is not a beginner's book. It does not rehash the same old instructions on how to do the basics. What it does, and does very well, is take you straight into the advanced topics of interfaces, delegates, reflection, attributes, multithreading, COM Interop, remoting, custom components, smart clients, web services, and much more. I can see how this information will help me build awesome applications that I would not have otherwise been able to do. Paul Kimmel's writing style is concise yet friendly. The examples truly help clarify the lesson at hand. The size of the book is small enough, 700 pages, that you can take your time to understand the material and still expect to complete the book in a reasonable amount of time. I know that I will be writing and delivering better software as a result of reading this book. It is exactly what I was looking for in a "Level 2" book. I don't know if there is a "Level 3" book or not, but I can only hope that if there isn't one, that Paul Kimmel is in the processing of writing it.

This book covers a grab bag of topics around the .NET platform. Topics range in obscurity from reflection (which it starts with) to just above basic, using ADO.NET with stored procedures. Threading, which is always a difficult topic to explain, was covered in a well written fashion, but lacked illustrations, which I think would have brought a lot of clarity to the subject. Other topics were given some illustrations, but overall the book used screenshots for most of the graphics. Remoting was another area that could have used illustrations. Overall well written, but could have been better organized and illustrated. Definitely worth a look over if you find that it covers topics of interest.

To start this book review I can only say one thing ... this book is AWESOME! I actually sat down and read the whole book in just over a week. I couldn't put it down. The way Mr. Kimmel writes will keep your attention GLUED to each page as you read and learn about Visual Basic .NET programming advanced topics. His sense of humor comes shining through in his examples and writing. It is a book that I could just not put down. I'd come home from work, grab a bite to eat and it was off to the reading room for me. I spent many a night this past week staying up late because I didn't want to close the book for another night. Mr. Kimmel did what a lot of books have tried to do, but in my opinion have come up short on all too many occasions. He started out in Chapter 1 explaining the differences between Visual Basic 6.0 and the new, improved Visual Basic .NET programming languages. He drilled down into the changes more than any other book I have read and made it so easy to understand the differences. This is also something that he did throughout the text. This was to give the reader a look back at the Visual Basic 6.0 language and then explain how it works now in the .NET world. That is something that many books have tried to do, but in my opinion, Mr. Kimmel NAILED the explanations to the barn door. He made is so easy to understand the VB.NET language now and the advanced features that are available to us as developers. I have spent the past three years teaching at the Community College of Aurora as an Adjunct Instructor in the Computer Sciences Division. I have had the opportunity to teach Visual Basic 6.0, Advanced Visual Basic 6.0, and Java programming languages. I have read and used many different textbooks in my tenure. Going forward, I'm going to be telling my Visual Basic .NET programming class students that this is the book they need to read after they have finished their Advanced VB.NET book. The textbooks that are available for instructors are all fine, but I believe that Mr. Kimmel's book will be a much higher benefit to my students who are serious about learning VB.NET and the power that it now has. I have already contacted some of my previous students who are Visual Basic .NET developers and have advised them to get their own copy of this book. My favorite chapters are 10 & 11, ADO.NET and Advanced ADO.NET. In my years of developing projects I have done A LOT of database programming, as most of us have. I found that ADO.NET is a subject that has MANY, MANY different books written about it. Most are very intricate and very technical, which is good for some people. For the rest of the folks out there, it's best to get a GOOD grounding in the basics before moving on to the heavy technical stuff. I believe that Mr. Kimmel found the secret of how to give us that understanding of ADO.NET that we can now go forth and build upon. That is how I feel about the entire book. There is enough technical

As a professional programmer with almost 2 years experience with the .NET framework, this book is a breath of fresh air. Finally, a book on .NET that goes beyond the basics and shows some of the more advanced and interesting capabilities of the framework.Highlights for me include a discussion on value and reference types, delegates for multithreading, reflection, attributes, COM interop, remoting, custom components (including UITypeEditor) and implementing Extender Provider controls (like the ToolTip control).I discovered many details of the framework that had eluded me. For example, did you know that all value types inherit from the ValueType class? how to add custom properties to all controls on a form? or how to use COM interop to provide a smooth path for the migration of VB6 application to .NET?On the down side, the chapters dealing with the subject of ADO.NET, which is itself in need of a few advanced books, only describe the more basics aspects of the technology. Also, there is no chapter on XML. Overall though, Kimmel does an excellent job of putting together a wealth of advanced subjects in a compact package.

There are endless books for beginners trying to learn .NET. This book is for people yearning for more. His discussing on Asynchronous operations is worth the price of the book alone. So is his discussion on No touch deployment. If you want to take your VB.NET knowledge up a level, this is the book for you.