The book is primarily designed for experienced Visual Basic developers making the transition to VB.NET. However, it can also be appreciated by other experienced programmers regardless of their programming background.

The book begins with an introduction to the differences between VB.NET and VB. The next chapter introduces you to the new Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE). You will get a tour of the main windows, and learn how to compile and debug your VB.NET applications. Chapter three teaches the VB.NET syntax. You will learn the VB.NET expressions, operators, and program control flow. The next couple of chapters form the core of the book. These chapters cover object oriented programming and inheritance. VB.NET is the first truly object oriented programming version of VB, and a solid understanding of these new features is essential in taking full advantage of VB.NET's new powers.

The next few chapters go on the cover important topics such as, event handling, error handling, building user interfaces, input/output streams, and multithreading. The final two chapters give a brief introduction to database access with VB.NET using ADO.NET, and a brief overview of ASP.NET.

The book provides clear and complete coverage of all topics. It includes many real world code examples which help the reader to better understand all the concepts presented.

This is a pretty-good book if you base it on the Beta. The chapters on OOP (Chapters 4 - Classes and Objects and 5 - Inheritance and Interfaces) are very long. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 (Event Handling and Delegates)form the heart of this book, but I would have broken them down into smaller chapters. The information in those chapters provide a good introduction to OOP. At times, I felt the authors were hard to follow and found myself re-reading several pages especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall this book probably is about 3 1/2 stars. I am hoping that in the next release of this book that the authors would follow their own advice and break the chapters down into smaller parts. ...

This is a pretty-good book if you base it on the Beta. The chapters on OOP (Chapters 4 - Classes and Objects and 5 - Inheritance and Interfaces) are very long. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 (Event Handling and Delegates)form the heart of this book, but I would have broken them down into smaller chapters. The information in those chapters provide a good introduction to OOP. At times, I felt the authors were hard to follow and found myself re-reading several pages especially in Chapters 4 and 5. Overall this book probably is about 3 1/2 stars. I am hoping that in the next release of this book that the authors would follow their own advice and break the chapters down into smaller parts. ...

I bought this book and several others to prepare myself for the transition from VB6 to VB.NET. I wish they would have covered the disconnected datasets, ADO.NET and ASP.NET in more detail. I would have given it 5 stars if it had.

Other than that, I feel that it is an excellent resource to prepare a programmer from any background for VS.NET. It does a good job of covering the OOP, Inheritance, Overloading, and multithreading subjects in a concise manner.

The book also has a web site for errata and source code. Gary Cornell is a good author and it shows in this book he co-authored.

I have a few Wrox Publishing Books, but my library is starting to collect more an more APRESS books because their style and format is what I expect from a book.

Wrox does publish some good books also:
I would also recommend .NET Enterprise Development in VB.NET from Design to Deployment, ISBN 1861006179, (Wrox Publishers)

This book simply doesn't have enough information to be named "a guide for EXPERIENCED programmer". It is rather a quick overall introductions. So don't get this book if you need to get some serious work done.

Of all the books I bought to learn VB NET, this is the one I find myself turning to repeatedly for information on object oriented programming. The author' treatment of inheritance and delegates/events are models of clarity. I also found his treatment of mutithreading to be clearer and far easier to understand than the new Wrox book which was supossedly devoted to threading. If you want a book on the VB NET language you can't do any better than this one!

I am primarily a Unix C/C++ person, but thought I would learn VB .Net to do some Windows programming. I found this book enjoyable and easy to read. Although there were numerous errors in the example code, the text itself was very good. Of course this book is geared to those with some programming experience and is not a good choice for the beginner.

I am a professional programmer who thinks that VB.NET is a great front end for server-side Java. (Java is still just too slow on the client.) Compared to Java, however, VB.NET is very new and very few books exist on the market. The final version of Visual Studio has only been out since February (2002). Nearly all of the VB.NET books on the market today are based on the .NET betas or were rushed to the market, or, in the case of this book, both. (This book was rushed even before the final version was out.)

I like the format of the writing very much, but the more I dug into the text and the final version of Microsoft's documentation, the more and more errors I found in the book. The authors refer to certain Visual Studio generated variables as keywords and do a poor job of explaining OOP and threading. Fortunately, I am experienced enough with Java (another OOP language) and VB 6 to be able to figure these things out for myself. If I were a beginner, I would be scarred for life.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend another book, since I don't believe a single book is good enough, yet. In the meantime, if you have the time, pick up two or three books and read them in conjunction with Microsoft's documentation. Also, be sure to do some of your own programming to make sure the techniques described in the books perform as expected.

I already very favorably reviewed this book already once but I can't resist commenting on Walker's disparaging comment about Cornell's teaching the GoTo. First off, what he says about the socially acceptable use of the GoTo is well known and was first pointed out by Donald Knuth (arguably the most famous computer thinker) in his paper "Structured programming with go to statements. Computing Surveys, 6(4):261--301, December 1974." He also explains that using Try/Catch is the better choice nowadays do I think Walker is way off base.

By the way, let me now add that the best book to follow Cornell is Balena's book from Microsoft Press.

This book appears to be a good bit more helpful than Dan Appleman's odious "Moving to VB.NET". However, one statement is very off-putting for me:

"...one can argue that there is one time when using the GoTo actually makes your code cleaner and easier to understand. In VB.NET, this situation could occur when you are deep inside a nested loop and some condition forces to leave all the loops simultaneously."

At the risk of sounding like a fanatic, I have been writing structured code for over twenty years and I have never once been forced to use a GoTo due to lack of a better, structured solution. For that matter I have very rarely found my self "deep inside a nested loop" in all those years. In structured, modular (and now object oriented) design there are infinitely better ways of handling things than the old prestructured wheels-within-wheels approach of ancient COBOL and FORTRAN. Anyone in the year 2002 professing to be competant enough to be writing a "Guide for Experienced Programmers" who can't figure out how to avoid using the GoTo statement and "deeply nested loops" loses a lot of credability with me.

This said, if your choice is between this book and Appleman's awful, useless tome, buy this one.

This "gee whiz" .NET book is based on Beta 2. It is a great intro to OOP theory, but it is not necessarily a good starting place for learning VB .NET programming in the real world.