I am an experienced VB6 programmer so I thought I could skip the "Beginning" edition from Wrox. I went onto this "Professional" edition. Boy was that a mistake. While I could follow the concepts in the book, they were presented in a very overly-complex manner. It seemed the authors (and there were a lot of authors) tried to present the most complex scenario they could think of for each topic. But then did not give any "real-world" cases where you would ever use all of the complexity and nuances discussed. They could have made the code examples much more direct and to the point without trying to confuse the reader. I think I could have gotten a basic skillset from the Beginning book and picked up anything else I needed through development. Also this book is absolutely filled with errors. Even the index is complete garbage, you have to download a corrected one from Wrox.com. I don't want to carry a bunch of loose pages around with the book as a side-bar.

I am an experienced VB6 programmer so I thought I could skip the "Beginning" edition from Wrox. I went onto this "Professional" edition. Boy was that a mistake. While I could follow the concepts in the book, they were presented in a very overly-complex manner. It seemed the authors (and there were a lot of authors) tried to present the most complex scenario they could think of for each topic. But then did not give any "real-world" cases where you would ever use all of the complexity and nuances discussed. They could have made the code examples much more direct and to the point without trying to confuse the reader. I think I could have gotten a basic skillset from the Beginning book and picked up anything else I needed through development. Also this book is absolutely filled with errors. Even the index is complete garbage, you have to download a corrected one from Wrox.com. I don't want to carry a bunch of loose pages around with the book as a side-bar.

This book is the sequel to "Beginning VB.NET 2003". That book of necessity had to devote time to going over basic syntactical material of VB.NET. By contrast, this book is squarely aimed at object oriented material.

It shows how to design a problem so as to have natural object classes. From these, the book moves into implementing these under VB. This of course leads immediately into topics like inheritance and interfaces. And how to make a hierarchy of classes. You get to imagine levels of abstraction, like virtual methods in a class, which act as placeholders for actual methods in derived classes. There is a good discussion of the various ways that polymorphism can arise.

Other chapters go into the GUI aspects of the language. Secondary emphasis really. These chapters are straightforward. Nothing conceptually hard here.

What is striking about the book is that in the OO chapters, if you remove the code examples, much of the text could apply to C++, Java and C#. What Microsoft has done is promote VB to the level of these languages.

This book is the sequel to "Beginning VB.NET 2003". That book of necessity had to devote time to going over basic syntactical material of VB.NET. By contrast, this book is squarely aimed at object oriented material.

It shows how to design a problem so as to have natural object classes. From these, the book moves into implementing these under VB. This of course leads immediately into topics like inheritance and interfaces. And how to make a hierarchy of classes. You get to imagine levels of abstraction, like virtual methods in a class, which act as placeholders for actual methods in derived classes. There is a good discussion of the various ways that polymorphism can arise.

Other chapters go into the GUI aspects of the language. Secondary emphasis really. These chapters are straightforward. Nothing conceptually hard here.

What is striking about the book is that in the OO chapters, if you remove the code examples, much of the text could apply to C++, Java and C#. What Microsoft has done is promote VB to the level of these languages.

First, this review DOES refer to the current edition:
Professional VB.NET 2003, 3rd Edition

I have purchased many, many books published by WROX. I have found them to, for the most part, to be GREAT books with a range of information. The books are in series, so you can choose either Beginner or Professional versions.

BUT the one thing I can't understand is their total disinterest in creating a decent index. This book has the worst INDEX of all. Not only is the index very skimpy (as most of the WROX books are,) but THIS book's index is FULL of mistakes. It seems virtually every listing sends the user to the WRONG page. I just don't understand what the problem with Wrox is. This index issue of skimpiness/mistakes is found throughout their catalog of books.

NOTE: As far as content, I would have given this book FIVE stars, but someone from WROX should start addressing the INDEX issues.

If you wish to see well done indices just look at books from Microsoft Press.

Again, please understand, the content of this book is excellent.

First, this review DOES refer to the current edition:
Professional VB.NET 2003, 3rd Edition

I have purchased many, many books published by WROX. I have found them to, for the most part, to be GREAT books with a range of information. The books are in series, so you can choose either Beginner or Professional versions.

BUT the one thing I can't understand is their total disinterest in creating a decent index. This book has the worst INDEX of all. Not only is the index very skimpy (as most of the WROX books are,) but THIS book's index is FULL of mistakes. It seems virtually every listing sends the user to the WRONG page. I just don't understand what the problem with Wrox is. This index issue of skimpiness/mistakes is found throughout their catalog of books.

NOTE: As far as content, I would have given this book FIVE stars, but someone from WROX should start addressing the INDEX issues.

If you wish to see well done indices just look at books from Microsoft Press.

Again, please understand, the content of this book is excellent.

I'd say this is the best Professional VB.NET book so far. I like the the ADO.NET part and VB control part of this book. Better than O'really ASP and VB book.

I'd say this is the best Professional VB.NET book so far. I like the the ADO.NET part and VB control part of this book. Better than O'really ASP and VB book.

This book is not based on Visual Studio.Net Final Release!

I have read the book front to back including introduction page. I just realized that the book was based on beta 2 of Visual Studio.Net, too late for a refund. Anyway, I went on to read it and found out that the book was not very much organised as tons of '...we'll discuss this on chapter xx ... ' appear no less than 5 times in a single chapter (on some chapters). Mispelled words also are catching enough to say that this book was in a hurry to be printed.

If you're looking for a book that covers thorough details on window forms and web form control howtos, this wouldn't give you enough detail on those topics. Web Services is equally a mere introduction, with about two pages of discussion on UDDI as well as WSDL. Not much on ADO.Net and XML.

I should have borrowed this book instead and skim through it or should have bought it for 20 bucks less. Besides, it's already outdated. I hope the same authors would come up with a second edition that has richer detail...and send me a free copy.

You would think in a book written about a language that has gone through as much of an evolution as VB has with .NET, that the book would contain more than 1 paragraph about printing. The same can be said about database access. Like Microsoft, they tell you how to do it with SQL, but your out of luck if you want to use an ODBC connected datasource. It took 4 hours on the internet to figure that one out. All in all its a good starting point and since VB doesn't even look like vb any more, this is a good book to get started with. Wait for release 2 though, its based on the released version of vb.net not the beta.

I always loved while working with VB 6.0. Right from the release of Visual Studio .NET, I was mainly looking to learn more about VB .NET. I have read a lot about the changes about ASP .NET when compared with classic ASP and I was really keeping my ears open to know about the changes that took place in VB .NET when compared to its predecessor. Well, I ended up in reading this book "Professional VB .NET" written by 14 well known authors.

Simple Statistics
Author(s): Fred Barwell, Richard Blair, Richard Case, Jonathan Crossland, Bill Forgey, Whitney Hankison, Billy S.Hollis, Rockfort Lhotka, Tim McCarthy, Jonathan Pinnock, Matthew Reynolds, John Roth, Bill Sheldon, Scott Short, Jan Narkiewicz, Rama Ramachandran and Bill Sempf.

Publisher: Wrox Pages: 943 Chapters: 25

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Why Do We Need Microsoft .NET?
Chapter 2: An Overview of New Features In VB.NET
Chapter 3: A First Look at a VB.NET Program
Chapter 4: Visual Studio.NET Integrated Development Environment
Chapter 5: The Common Language Runtime
Chapter 6: Variables and Types
Chapter 7: Namespaces
Chapter 8: Windows Forms
Chapter 9: Error Handling
Chapter 10: Creating Windows Controls
Chapter 11: Object Syntax Introduction
Chapter 12: Inheritance and Interfaces
Chapter 13: Applying Objects and Components
Chapter 14: Assemblies
Chapter 15: Threading
Chapter 16: Working with Classic COM and Interfaces
Chapter 17: Comopnent Services
Chapter 18: Data Access with ADO.NET

Chapter 19: Using XML in VB.NET
Chapter 20: Web Forms
Chapter 21: Creating Web Controls
Chapter 22: Web Services in VB .NET
Chapter 23: Windows Services
Chapter 24: Deployment in .NET
Chapter 25: Security in the .NET Framework
Appendix A: Using the Visual Basic Compatibility Library

Who is this Book for?

This book is primarily aimed at experienced Visual Basic developers. Particularly, it is for those who need to make the transition to VB .NET and want more detailed and up-to-date information.

An insight into some of the Chapters

This books starts with an overview of Microsoft .NET and just how much it changes application development. Understanding these concepts is essential to using VB.NET in the most effective manner. In Chapter 2, the book discusses about the major changes in VB.NET when compared to VB 6.0. If you want to compare VB 6.0 and VB .NET you should read this chapter.

Chapter 5 (The Common Language RunTime) is awesome. This has some serious discussions about the evolution of .NET. This chapter also talks about, how Garbage Collector works in VB .NET. In a nut shell, this chapter covers all aspects of VB .NET that you should know. Chapter 6 and 7 discusses about datatypes and Namespaces respectively. Namespaces encapsulate the very building blocks of .NET. Chapter 7 has all about Namespaces. Well, upto Chapter 7, the book gives us an over all idea about the new VB .NET. In the coming chapters, it takes us to the real world of VB .NET.

Windows Forms is discussed in Chapter 8. It teaches you how you can create forms in VB .NET. The new cool feature of VB .NET is its error handling. We have a new error handling mechanism, which is called as "Exception Hanldler". Chapter 9 describes the new error handling methods. The highlight of this book is yet to come. Chapter 10 takes you to world of creating "Custom Windows Controls".

In earlier versions, VB 6.0, it was really hard time for developers to keep track of the versions of the Component that we are developing. Registering a component, unregistering a component, change in compatibility blah blah blah. Now with VB.NET, versioning is very simple. Chapter 14 has an overview of, how versioning is done in VB.NET.

Tell me any business who do not work with storing and retrieval of information. Data Access with ADO.NET is discussed in chapter 18. You also get to know about working with XML in "Using XML in VB.NET". We also have a chapter which goes through about creating a Web service, how to consume a Web Service.

Creating a Windows Service is very easy with VB.NET. We can easily create Windows Services by creating an application that is installed as a service. For example, suppose we want to monitor for files in a directory and react to the data in those files. We could write a Windows Service application that waits for those files, extracts the information and then starts another process to use that data. The chapter 23, "Windows Services", has some good examples about creating a File monitor, writing events using E-mail and creating a Remoting Service. This chapter also discusses about how to debug a Service. This chapter is really awesome.

In Appendix A, we have a great discussion about the compatibility library. This library will assist in the conversion of existing code, as well as providing backward compatibility and support for developers who are transitioning to the new version.

I find only good things with this book. It has everything that a experienced VB developer should know. You can very well add this book to your collection.

...spoil the soup. The combined regurgitation of 17 authors, each with their own programming style and unorthodox naming conventions makes for a very confusing book. The proofing on this book is absolutely miserable. You had better be a professional developer to get past the myriad of errata in the sample code and text.

All in all, the book does provide a decent jumping off point from which to explore the world of VB.Net. Don't expect a definitive manual, though. If you want that, read the online documentation for Visual Studio.Net. In many ways it is far superior and certainly the last word. I did read this book cover to cover and worked through all the examples. Thankfully, I was able to pick out and fix the errors in the code. A less experienced developer may become quickly frustrated with this book.

The examples are often academic and rarely provide any real-world insight into the intricacies of application development. Another frustrating point is the continued use of the phrase "...we'll explain that later in chapter 'XX'...". In some cases this phrase is used several times in one paragraph. It points to a lack of organization and planning as to how the material should have been presented. You should rightly be very suspicious about a book that was written well before the actual release of the .Net SDK. I think it would be safe to say that as a result, none of the authors have written production .Net code. And from the look of some of their examples, God help their clients.

Overall rating: disappointing. Would I buy it? Probably not. I was able to get my hands on one of several copies floating around at one of my client sites. If you have the ability to borrow it, do so and save yourself the $40. Otherwise, just skip it and read the online documentation that comes with the product.

If you are new to the .NET/VB.NET realm, then this is a good place to start. However, i have found a lot of errors (spelling as well as logical), hence the three stars.

Yes, it is written by many authors and you can see some of that. Despite this, the book has helped me to start writing our applications using .NET instead of VB6. It does some good explanations of fundamentals, and does not bog down too deep in the framework and Microsoft's reasons for .NET . On the down side, it does not give a lot of detail on many other things that may need deeper understanding. There definitely needs to be a second edition or a part 2 to this book to give us those deeper samples. But since it is Wrox, I imagine we will see those in separate titles (such as Professional Web Services, etc.) Considering that at this time, the final product has not shipped, I think it is a good start. All-in-all, a good book to use; one of the best on the topic as of this review.