unobriani said
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.

W Boudville said
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.

David A. Michelson said
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.

said
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.

Jonathan A. Claveria said
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.