Book Review: Special Edition Using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
Title: Special Edition Using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
Authors: Brian Siler & Jeff Spotts
ISBN: 0-7897-2572-x
Published: December, 2001
Price: $39.99 USD
Pages: 830
Rating 2 out of 5
Review by: Eric C. Willman
This book is described as being a "beginning to intermediate" book, but should more accurately be described as a beginning book. The book does not go into any detail about more sophisticated concepts. It seems as though you have to be beyond a beginner to comprehend the downloadable samples, but the sophistication is not there for the intermeidate or beyond developer.
The entire section on writing applications for a Pocket PC is completely out of date, with no mention of the Mobile Internet Toolkit, or the .NET compact framework.
All of the code listings in the book are captioned as [somefilename].ZIP -- and when you download the sourcecode, the ZIP file names in the book do not actually correspond with the real ZIP files. If you hunt around, you can find all of the example code files in the downloaded ZIP files, but nothing is actually named the same as it is in the book. For someone who is a seasoned developer, this was not a huge problem, BUT this book claims it is appropriate for people who are new to Visual Basic and even for people who have never programmed before.
To complicate the code samples even further, each ZIP file actually contains a Visual Studio solution file and project file which encompases the appropriate code files for the example. This is actually extremely convenient for working with the samples in Visual Studio -- HOWEVER, this structure of the zip files is never explained! Again, not a problem for an experienced developer, but could be extremely confusing to someone who has never worked with Visual Studio before.
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