Product Description

Although this book is designed for people who are new to the .NET Framework, Visual Basic, or even programming, its goals are ambitious. In just 20 chapters, you will learn how to develop graphical user interfaces, how to develop applications that work with databases through ADO.NET, how to develop web applications that use Web services and XML, and much more. It's all there in the unique Murach style that has been training professional programmers for more than 25 years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #867739 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 692 pages

Review
"Your Beginning Visual Basic .NET is by far the best book on the market for us beginners! Had I bought your book first, I would have saved myself lots of dollars and several months' time."

About the Author
Anne Prince

Customer Reviews

Excellent for absolute beginner, but lacking some details
As an introduction to VB.NET for a complete beginner, this is probably an excellent reference. Very clearly laid out and illustrated (like most of the Murach books), and with 18 useful (though necessarily basic) application samples, source code for which can be downloaded from the Murach site.

However, if you have some programming experience already, especially in earlier versions of Visual Basic, you may find this a little light in some areas. There's nothing on graphical techniques or deployment, for example (and deployment under .NET involves many novel techniques), object-oriented concepts are dealt with somewhat cursorily, and the ADO (database programming) section involves total reliance on VS.NET wizards. I'd like to have seen more on constructing ADO.NET applications programmatically, especially as some of the VS.NET ADO wizards have bugs in them.

For those who tend to be swayed by the number of pages, I should mention that the layout adopted throughout the book is to have one page with a textual description of what's going on, and the facing page containing effectively the same information in summary, diagramatic or tabular form. Personally, as I progressed through the book, I found myself referring to the diagrams and tables and dispensing with the text altogether, which kind of makes many of the 720 pages redundant.

I don't think this edition is quite as good as Murach's earlier Visual Basic 6 book, by the same author, but I would highly recommend it for complete beginners. If you're already well versed in VB6, for example, you may want to go for something meatier.