This book would be acceptable if I were an editor viewing a rough draft. As a finished product, this book is a disgrace. I've never seen so many spelling errors in my life. Not to mention coding errors. I didn't have to get past chapter 2 to realize that this book was being sent back immediately. I read up through chapter 5, but that was all I could take. What a horrible book. Nearly every coding sample had errors in it and the references to the code being discussed within the text used the wrong names half the time! I didn't know what they were talking about within the code! This book is really a disgrace. I will never buy a book from these authors, a so-called "bible" reference, or a "Michael Lane Thomas" Approved .NET series editor ever, EVER again. Just awful.

I like how this book has attained a good balance of being a tutorial and reference book. It has many great examples and does a great job of explaining how to better understand how to develop in .NET!!!

This is by far the worst book I have ever read on any programming language. I would have to say that 90% of the code examples are wrong. I have been programing in VB.NET since the beta's and thought this book might be good for some reference. I was totally wrong.
Seems to me that it was written too fast by to many blind people who have no idea what they where doing. Its almost as if they where making things up as they went along! If you want a good book dont get this one.

After reading VB.Net by Fransesco Balena, this one was its poor cousin. If anyone were to get into the ADO.Net chapter, that persons database access knowledge is bound to get scarred for life. Majority of the samples dont work. take a rain check.

After reading VB.Net by Fransesco Balena, this one was its poor cousin. If anyone were to get into the ADO.Net chapter, that persons database access knowledge is bound to get scarred for life. Majority of the samples dont work. take a rain check.

I was first amazed at the size of this book. It is large, 1240 pages and not only covers vb.net ... but everything you want to use vb.net for (ASP.NET, Windows forms, webservices, etc). If you want to be a .net developer who uses vb.net, then get this book. As someone said earlier, it also makes a awesome desk reference.

I only read two chapters of this book for ADO.Net and Multithreading. I would have to say that the ADO.Net section was good. On the otherhand, the Multithreading section was very skimpy, but it does show the reader where to start.

I thought the book was well written and very informative. Yes, I agree that it lacks a complete OO discussion, but if you want that get an OOP book. Besides that I think they cover both the language and the IDE very well, with good examples and good discussion.

Additionaly the book makes a great reference to the language and IDE after your done reading it completely.

One star might be a bit harsh okay, but I paid fifty bucks for a book that as another reviewer put it, was `little better than the SDK documentation'. I'll give the authors credit, this book is a *little* better than the SDK docs, but not much. (as an aside: when did Microsoft decide to support the publishing industry by writing substandard documentation?)

Specifically my problems with this book stem from its structure. The book is a fairly comprehensive, (albeit in places erroneous) reference of the various object, methods and classes within VB.NET. What it fails to do is provide you with any kind of framework to put all of these pieces together. Furthermore, it even makes the same mistake that the SDK documentation makes when defining its object reference, *it uses local terms to define other local terms.*

Example (figurative, not literal):

The Fravitz class allows the user to access a collection of Chavitz which can be accessed from the Fravitz.Chavitz([iCollectionID]) method....

The above is all well and good as long as somewhere they bother to tell you what a fravitz is and what a chavitz is and why you'd want either of them (which this book does not).

Additionally, the book fails to deliver on its promise of a guide on migrating from previous versions of VB to VB.NET. I've been programming with Visual Basic since the BETA of Version 1. I've seen quite a lot of changes in the language since then (most notably versions 3 and 5) and VB.NET promises to be the best and most comprehensive (and needed) overhaul the language has received. This book in its conception of offering readers a solid migration path, and a "100% Comprehensive, Authoritative, What you Need" is great, it's just that it fails to deliver on any of that.

I guess that I am the exception here, since everyone else seems to love this book. I thought that the book was not very well put together. Let me give you some concrete examples:

First, I think that it has already been said that this book does not have enough OOP. That is probably true. I have been doing OOP for so long that I didn't miss the omission, but it might be a little frustrating for a novice.

There are also a lot of little things that I noticed. Much of the book seems to be a reprinting of the .NET SDK documentation. Another thing that bothered me quite a bit is that in their tables that list the methods of classes, they didn't list the return values of the methods. This may seem like a little thing, but it meant that I had to go look everything up in the SDK anyway, so after a while I ditched the book and just used the SDK.

Another thing that I noticed was some incorrect terminology. As an example, Mr. Beres refers to the System.IO.Directory class as a "static" class. I knew what he meant, because I am also a Java programmer, but that terminology is not used in VB.NET. That could be very confusing because there is no such thing as a static class in VB.NET. VB used to support static methods, but static in this sense meant something completely different than what Mr. Beres is trying to express. I believe that he meant that the class consists only of Shared methods, not that it is a static class.

Again, I don't mean to nitpick here, because there were some good things, too. I have also written books for a competing publisher, so I know how hard it is to get everything just right (trust me folks, its not as easy as it looks!), and the authors have done an admirable job. It's just that better attention to detail as well as more consideration of the audience could have made this book so much better.

It is really a well written book. The authors are really good programmers. Good treatment is given as for as the GUI and .NET framework is concerened. Surprisingly not much about OOP itself. For example the most important form of inheritance, namely the interface inheritance is not at all discussed! If you read this book along with cornell's apress book (which is excellent for OOP but lacks GUI treatment)then you will get the complete picture.