Rating:  - Useless
This book leaves you with no usefull knowledge in accomplishing anything other than following cookbook instructions.
BIG gaps in providing anything usefull: No details in binding to and formatting grids or other form objects.
Rating:  - A title well chosen
I'm an intermediate ASP programmer with a year of Java background and a few months VB5 and I felt that with the .NET technique coming up I needed to freshen up my VB knowledge some. Since this book was handed out to me for free on a Microsoft developer's day I decided to read it. I was able to finish it in a couple of days because this book does what it promisses in it's title.
It gives you an overview of the new technologies/syntax and does this in a clear and easy to follow way. Great book for a beginner or an intermediate programmer that likes an easy read.
This book gives you a start and sure it leaves you wanting to know more, but that's good right? Better than to feel exhausted and drained afterwards. Me personally I felt exited about the new possibilities and now, a day after finishing this book, I got started with SAM's ASP.NET in 21 days book.
Every chapter by the way has a nice little overview of what is different from VB6, which is nice if you have a background in that.
Who is his book NOT for: experienced programmers will probably want a book with more depth to read in their valuable time. Furthermore if you are experienced, but want to learn Object Oriented programming, I would buy a book just about that. I didn't care that there wasn't too much about it in this book since I did a year of Java, but you do need to now what it is and just what you can do with it if you wanna program .NET and get the most out of it.
Happy programming!
Rating:  - Not Just for Beginners
I consider myself an intermediate VB programmer, with 30 years programming in many, many languages. I have worked several months in my spare time on a significant VB.NET project, and reading this book after several others with more depth, I found useful information in every step that was missing from other books, while they may be in more depth, there are things here that are skipped over or missing in other books.
Rating: - A perfect start to VB.net for BEGINNERS
I tried out this book with my fingers crossed hoping that it would treat me as a novice/beginner. And trust me, I learnt more and faster through this book than any book that I used to start off with VB 6.0 .
The author takes u on a smooth ride with elegant examples through various topics.
However, there seems to be something not too right with the explanation about ADO.net in this book. You may need to recheck with the examples in the CD with what he describes in the book.
Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to start off with VB.net. This book is certainly not for people who know VB very well or are too experienced with it.
Rating: - Good Overview of VB.Net but short on OOP
After going through several books so far on VB.Net, this seems to be the book that I refer back to the most. It covers a wide variety of topics (the chapter on printing is especially useful and so far, the only book I've found that covers printing in detail through VB).
The weakness is in the lack of Object Oriented Programming Topics. It does cover them, but they are spread throughout the book and not really defined well.
Note too that this book is intended to be an overview of the language. It is not intended to cover a large amount of detail on all topics (like Web Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML, etc.) It does however, allow you to get started with each of these and has a good appendix on where to go next. The other extremely valuable feature in this book is each chapter begins with a section that highlights the differences between VB 6 and VB.Net. If you are coming from VB 6, this is invaluable.
So, if you're getting started, this book is a great overview of the language. If you are starting from scratch, I would recommend starting with "Coding Techniques for Microsoft Visual Basic .Net" to get comfortable with OOP first, then come back to this one to get more coverage of the VB language.
If you're already comfortable with OOP, but not VB.Net or are migrating from VB 6, you will find this book to be a great tool and well worth the cost of adding it to your book shelf. If you are already comfortable with VB.Net and are looking for in-depth type coverage, look elsewhere.
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