Yes this may noot have all you need , but if you are teaching a course in VB this is an exceelent book to use. I also like it for people who want to teach themself vb programming. I have worked as a programmer/instructor for over 10 years and have used this authors books in previous editions, it is great for beginners. There are tons of hands on exercises you can have your studnets try

I am giving the book one star because of the number of exercises in it and no stars is not an option.
I have read a fair number of books on programming before this book and I must say this is the worst one yet.
I can't believe my school used this book.
The exercises in the book are fine; even good.
The rest of the book is almost useless.
The writing is cryptic at best.
I can look at the exercises and read the programs fine.
The instruction on the other hand I can't make heads or tails out of most of the time.
It is like one person wrote the chapters and another wrote the exercises.
I finally gave up on reading the chapters and just started doing the exercises.
I can't discourage this book enough.

Excellent book. Very pedagogical. Perfect learning tool. Any body who wants to spend serious efforts to learn VB.Net should
try this book.

I bought this book for a class at my university, im currently majoring in IT. I found this book to be very easy to read and to understand. The code Samples are very simple and the books provides a reasonable ammount of exercise to work on. One Downside to this book is that the autor explanation to some topics in tha latter chapters of the book tends to be incomplete but is a pretty good book up to chapter 8. One important thing though is that if you want to master VB.NET this is not the book for you its main purpose is just to give you a brief introduction to the language.

I bought this book for a class at my university, im currently majoring in IT. I found this book to be very easy to read and to understand. The code Samples are very simple and the books provides a reasonable ammount of exercise to work on. One Downside to this book is that the autor explanation to some topics in tha latter chapters of the book tends to be incomplete but is a pretty good book up to chapter 8. One important thing though is that if you want to master VB.NET this is not the book for you its main purpose is just to give you a brief introduction to the language.

The way this book is written the author throws you a scrap of information and does not reinforce this scrap whatsoever and thus leaves you confused, stressed, and upset !

This may sound harsh, but please do not purchase this book unless required to do so by your university (like me). I am an MIS major, and must admit my serious weakness is in programming. This book has done nothing to help me ! If you are a programming person, pickup this book and you'll enjoy. If you are more of a systems administrator type and you know programming knowledge is necessary, but are not the programming type then run far, far away from this book !

The way this book is written the author throws you a scrap of information and does not reinforce this scrap whatsoever and thus leaves you confused, stressed, and upset !

This may sound harsh, but please do not purchase this book unless required to do so by your university (like me). I am an MIS major, and must admit my serious weakness is in programming. This book has done nothing to help me ! If you are a programming person, pickup this book and you'll enjoy. If you are more of a systems administrator type and you know programming knowledge is necessary, but are not the programming type then run far, far away from this book !

this book is very good for new to vb.net people specilly for buisness like applications and i think this is the best book if u wanna self study the vb.net it has everything except the graphics(they're coverd a little bit),do u know why i think this book is very good because it has flowcharts, it has programming excersizes and on top of that lots of examples. But the major reason i bought this book because this book has projects assignments which i dont find in many books, i carefully searched for many days for the good book and then decided to buy this one.if ur college has three semesters for visual basic programming this book will cover atleasat two and half semester or "two semesters" for sure. i'll recommend this book to anyone who is a beginner programmer or a little better than beginner. THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR PRO PROGRAMMERS.

The best way to learn a computer language is the same as the best way of learning a human language, you need to practice. That's why practice problems are essential to any beginner's book to any programming language. This book has BY FAR the most practice problems for the VB.net learners. It also has detailed and useful explaination of basic VB.net concepts. What you learn in this book will provide a solid framwork for more complicated VB.net subjects.

if you don't know know anything about programming, and you have to use visual basic, you should use this book. after reading it at least until chapter 8, and you want to read books like Deitel&deitel or Coding Technique, i believe you will understand it much3x better.

This book is not a good one for "Introduction" to Programming using VB. My opinion obviously, but I find the book to draw way too many assumptions about what the reader already knows about VB. Reading this text I find myself re-reading over and over again the concepts that I am supposed to learn. The author throws out several concepts, definitions and terms all within one sentence. It is difficult to digest. Have a pen ready with lots of ink- you will have to make your own notes to make sense of it. I have only read 130 pages and was forced to buy another text to fill in the gaps. Too bad- the other text is quite good (Murach's Beginning VB) but this is not the book used for my class. There are a billion examples- for me the approach that works best is type out every example and just study it with the help the other text, websites and online help. Perhaps is this is the best way to get it done- but I personally feel learning this way is too labor intensive.

This is a reworking of Schneider's earlier VB book(s). It is important at the outset to grasp that this book, like his others, is written from a traditional data processing perspective (ubiquitous bank/loan account examples). Strong emphasis on structured programming is demonstrated throughout. So it's quite traditional in how it approaches topics. It has a marvellous collection of exercises both short and project based. If you can work through these, you will have a very good knowledge of traditional core programming skills. And this is the key point of the text: it is primarily about teaching you how to program using VB.net as the instruction medium and not anything else.

This is no quick tips and tools book, though it obviously contains such. Secondly, it is not a how to do GUIs book. You won't find much here on building multimedia applications or graphical games. Instead, the book offers a shoehorning of masses of programming techniques into the VB.net environment. And the work is very high quality both in terms of the examples and their pedagogical value.

In terms of layout, the book is particularly good. For a start it more or less lies flat when you open it. Colour coding of programs is used, and each chaper and topic is illustrated with clearly flagged example code and displays. There is no shortage of well developed code, (though some of the examples may seem a little conservative).

The first two thirds of the book introduces a bit of history and traditional programming thinking: procedures, decision logic, loops, arrays and files. The remainder deals with controls, OO in VB.net and database access. The OO chapter uses a reasonable number of examples to convey techniques and the exercises are interesting, but it is introductory (don't expect a crash course in abstract datatypes). However the chapter has but one graphics based example which is a bit mean.

While the book has exemplary strengths over and above the majority in the field, there are a few weaknesses which indicate the need for at least one supplementary text.

In the first place, the book has nothing to say on GDI+ programming, and many will judge this oversight as a serious flaw. Secondly, the multiple document interface capacity of VB.net (changed somewhat from VB6) is not developed. Indeed with the exception of three pages on adding multiple forms (482-485), the rationale for multiwindowed displays is completely overlooked. In fairness, the book is not focused around user interface design issues (either a strength or a weakness depending on your needs).

The chapter on databases access is good but just above elementary. However, don't expect a run down on web servers and XML. These topics are not covered. Even a brief chapter on XML would not be out of place.

From a slightly more pedantic position, I am surprised that there is no general chapter on data structures. Arrays are given a very handsome chapter, and sorting a searching are developed well, but we don't explore explicitly stacks and queues. Now one of the strengths of VB.net is that stack and queue creation and manipulation are made trivial due to inbuilt functions. It would have been useful to see these in action. Moreover, trees and graphs are not covered, and that is a bit of a puzzle.

Overall the book is a superb programming text. Dated perhaps in some of its focus, but still a better introduction to programming than many notionally equivalent texts, which are perhaps more glamorous, but almost certainly less thoughtful.