Rating:  - Visual Basic.NET How to Program, Second Edition
I had to buy this book for a programming class in Visual Basic.Net. I've previsously had a course in Visual Basic and got an A so I am not new to programming. I say all that to say, this book falls far short of what I hoped I was getting for $100. I've typed in some of the example progams word for word and cannot get a simple program to work, generating random numbers, for example. I'm at the point now where I'll have to go shopping for another book in this subject, the Deitel book is nothing but frustration to me!
Rating:  - Bottom Line.....................The Deitels rock!!
This book covers so much ground it is hard to find any criticism. I did read the other reviewers and found that what was disliked the most was the bold font and things of that nature. Hey, I like the style, but that's me. I think my only criticism is always their first chapter in which it describes "What is a computer". But despite that chuckle, the book rocks, bottom line.
I am a professional software developer and I still read this book often. You can't go wrong with authors like David Sceppa (ADO.NET) or Francesco Balena (Visual Basic 2005: The Language) either, but never will you go wrong with Deitel.
It is that good.........
Rating:  - Hard to like
Remember when you had to read classical literature, and it seemed like the author wouldn't change paragraphs for pages at a time, and it was hard to keep your place, pay attention, or care? Well, this book is exactly like that. It is chock full of "information", I'll give it that. Problem is, their examples DON'T WORK. I'm trying to do SQL database management using the code from the book for a template, and it doesn't function whatsoever. I've wasted hours because this book is worthless as a reference, even worse as a textbook.
Also, if you're not a fan of heavy formatting, skip this book. There are more than one bold words per line. Just for kicks, I flipped to a random page (663) and counted 16 bold words in the second paragraph, which is only ten lines long. There's only one paragraph out of six that doesn't have any words bolded. It's almost like they couldn't decide which words were important, so they just went ahead and bolded/italicized everything that seemed even remotely important. This detracts from legibility and readability immensely, and is seriously infuriating when you're trying to scan for a particular keyword. Some people apparently like this style, but I think it's utterly painful to read, much less learn from.
However, all that said, I would definately recommend this book to the following people: masochists, professors who hate their students, people who have never read a halfway decently written/formatted textbook in their lives, and people who like to flush money down the toilet. Also, if you enjoy going to the dentist, this book might be for you. I'm not just someone off the street, either. I've been programming since the days of QBasic, and have read dozens of books on the topic, and this is by far the worst. If I can repel just one person from buying it/choosing it for their class, the world will be a better place and I can die fulfilled.
Rating:  - Good Book
I am still not very far into this but the instructions and examples are clear and easy to follow. It is a bit pricy but a great book for this subject.
Rating: - How could anyone like this book?
When I first got this book, I was impressed with all the code and the fancy layout. But around half-way through I realized the following:
1. A lot of the output was in something like DOS-boxes! Can you believe that. With such a powerful system as VB.NET, they're outputing to DOS-boxes!
2. The rest of the time output was to MessageBox.Show(), which is just a very simple standard IO dialog box. I finally got disgusted when the book got to geometric output and, instead of drawing circles, I was still just printing out the values of the radius and diameter in dialog boxes. I thought to myself "What the hell is the purpose of this? I'm not learning anything!"
3. I took a cursory examination of subsequent chapters and throughout the whole book the authors use those stinking MessageBox.Show() functions.
Now the book does cover a lot of territory, but I can't believe the authors couldn't do a better job. Keep searching-this book stinks.
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