This is a decent read, teaches you some important topics like collections, strings, etc. But if you buy this book, supplement your reading with a complete VB book.

For some of us learning programming has been less of a structured approach and more of a journey, picking up what we could as we went along. This book is a significant aid in that it takes us back to the basics of how to write problem solving code and at the same time giving us an extended toolbox to apply to how we perform it. It has been a real help to me by reinforcing things to me that I thought I understood, and teaching me new ways to do things that I had no idea on how to approach.
Al Edlund

I have selected this book to be the textbook of an introductory course in data structures and algorithms for my second year programming students. There were three major reasons behind this choice:

1- The book doesn't go into the mathematics found in other books. Of course, mathematics are essential for those who want to create algorithms, but it's not the case for the majority of programmers, at least in the business computing field, who just want to implement them. On the contrary, I think that teaching the mathematics underlying the construction of algorithms makes the learning process unnecessarily hard.

2- On the data structures field, the book takes advantage of structures already implemented in the major development platforms. As the author says it: "students of data structures and algorithms can now see how to use a data structure before learning how to implement it" (Preface, p. vii). From an educational standpoint, this is a far better approach than starting to discuss a concept abstractly.

3- The examples are in VB .NET, which I consider a good starting programming language. For those who rather prefer another language, the author has recently published the same book for C#: "Data Structures and Algorithms Using C#".

In a word, I consider this book an excellent practical approach to learn common data structures and algorithms without going into the complexity of mathematics.

Michael McMillan's "Data Structures and Algorithms Using Visual Basic.Net" is an excellent resource for the serious programmer using Visual Basic.Net. With the advent of the .Net technology there have been some major changes to Visual Basic, one of them being the collection classes. Most vb reference books provide a weak introduction to the collections and how to use them; this is the focus of the book and really allows the reader to gain enough confidence to start using them effectively in their own programs.



I look forward to more books from this author.

McMillan does for Visual Basic in .NET what other languages like Java, C and C++ have long had. Fundamental data structures like hash tables or hash sets, arrays, linked lists. He shows how to use these in the VB context. They greatly simplify your programming tasks. These constructs are so widely used in any practical programming language.

Without them, you find yourself having to tediously reinvent basic functionality. Adding little value. And with the risk that your implementations might be buggy.

McMillan shows how to use the structures in several algorithms. Having said that, this book will not be of any surprise to someone already familiar with algorithms. It does not go into these to the depth of Knuth's 'Art of Computer Programming', or Sedgewick's texts.