I am a systems development manager with 30 years programming experience. An acquaintance is taking a beginning VB programming course, using this text, and has asked me to review some of his assignments. I was dismayed to see an example of a Circle Class presented in this book in which a Radius property has public getters and setters and the abstract parent class has a public Area property getter. In the constructor for the Circle class, radius is a required argument. On instantiation, Area is immediately calculated and stored as part of the class instance. The Circle class also allows the radius to be modified but area is only calculated on instantiation. Therefore, a consumer of this class, without prior knowledge of this very odd design, could easily change the radius then ask for the area. They would receive the area based on the radius at initial instantiation, not the correct area based on the modified radius!

With all due respect to the authors, this is terrible programming and has no place in a textbook. It teaches bad programming to students that will eventually enter the workforce. It does them and their eventual employers a disservice.

It would have been valuable for the authors to follow up this example code with a critique and point out its flaws to readers; however, I saw no such follow-up. I would not recommend this text for a programming class.