Visual Basic.Net: A Beginner's Guide

I have been programming in Visual Basic .Net (for Windows) now for about 2 years. I began with this book and I recommend that others do the same. It is an excellent primer on the language and will get you up and going in a very short time. The book begins with an explanation of what Visual Basic .Net is and an introduction to "object oriented programming." This simply refers to the visual objects you create, like buttons, check boxes, etc, that you often see in Windows applications or on the web. Each chapter provides a project for you to work on, allowing you to build your knowledge from chapter to chapter in this hands-on manner. At the end of each chapter is a "Mastery Check" which lists all of the things you should have learned in the chapter. For those with any programming experience (even old guys like me with FORTRAN programming experience), picking up Visual Basic .Net will be relatively easy and very rewarding. I have programmed games for my 5th grade Sunday School class that the kids love to play, and I have programmed applications that allow me to work with large data files and generate output that I can manipulate further in Microsoft Excel. I have only scratched the surface; the possible applications are endless. For me, the hardest part of learning to program in a .Net language was getting used to the "object oriented" part of the programming. The abundance of examples in this book helped me tremendously. Step-by-step examples and sample code are provided for each project. Even now, I often go back to this book as a refernece on how to do stuff right. Finally, as the book's title implies, the material in this book is not exhaustive; however, it gets you started in the right direction. I strongly recommend that starting programmers and those new to Visual Basic .Net start with this book. In addition, I recommend that you get one of the books in the Deitel series for more intense learning and the Visual Basic .Net Language Reference published by Microsoft. Together, these 3 books will get you going and keep you going. As far as the programming language itself, look for an academic version instead of buying directly from Microsoft, and you can save a fair amount of money. Good luck!

If you are just getting into programming, or VB.NET programming, this is a great book to pick up.This book starts with the absolute basics in programming and builds on it. It hits all of the fundamentals of programming, such as variables, their scope, if..then...else statements, loops, arrays, variable comparisons, etc.This book doesn't get too advanced, though I did wish it would have touched on object oriented programming a little bit more. The earlier a beginner gets into OOP the better.If you have programming experience, or experience with VB in general, pass this book up. You probably won't get so much (or anything) out of this book and there are better books to go to. As the title says, this is a beginner's guide.

This book offers instruction on how to organize your code and explains when you need to use which loop structure etc. Good book to build a foundation. If your looking for something that offers fancy displays you can be disappointed but then you missed the intended message. Book helps you understand what is going on in the code and more.