[.ca] Mastering Visual Basic.Net (ISBN 0782128777)

The good, the bad, and the beautiful:
This is an excellent book for beginners or intermediate programmers. Good points: This book explains subjects that most other books on VB .Net ignore. If you are considering buying any other book on the dot net environment, look in its index and see if it covers FileStream, ArrayList, SortedList. Most do not cover these, but Petroutsos's book does and they really simplify life. They add to the power of your programs and cut down on the amount of work you have to do. This book has a lot of other similar features of the environment that other books skip. Bad points: I am appalled by the number of errors in the programming examples and descriptions. Be aware that when he writes "to the right" he often means "to the left" and vice-versa. Be aware that he likes to declare variables that do absolutely nothing in his code segments: they are declared, they use up memory, and the program never refers to them after they are declared. Be aware that the code given in the book does not always conform to the code sample in the CD that accompanies the book. There iss an errata sheet for the text on the Sybex web, but I have never succeeded in getting them to correct errors I point out to them. Conclusions: You can overcome the bad points above so they are minor speed bumps, however annoying. What you cannot do is find a better text for learning the basics of .Net and also learn to use the tools that make you never want to go back to VB Version 6..

Put this one back:
I found this book to be riddled with errors both in the text and the programming examples. The exercises left out key information and required additional debugging and programming just to make them work correctly. Several of his screen examples did not display the correct information and were misleading. Other screens examples might have been semantically correct, but were not correct within the context they were presented. In my opinion the book also presented the information backwards, the concept of creating custom controls and such was covered in the beginning of the book while database access and file access were covered at the end.

Excellent book. as an introduction to Visual Basic.Net:
This is really an excellent book if you want a very good introduction to the basics of Visual Basic.Net. The book is good read, good examples, very comprehensive. If you are want to start with Visual BAsic.Net, GET THIS BOOK.

Anything but "Mastering":
After reading this book, I still had to read two more to get real world applications developed. This book could be usefull for an absolute beginner, but even if you had never seen VB .Net in your life, you could benefit more with other books. I gave it three stars because the chapter on the TreeView, and the ListView controls were usefull because there were important changes in the way those controls are used, but the ADO chapters just get you confused, I had to read another book on ADO .Net to fully understand how some of the examples worked. The sample applications on the CD-ROM are completely different from the code that is printed, so there's no way to know what the thing is doing after you've spent too much time figuring out on you own. If you're a beginner, get it, you will find some things helpful, but if you know your stuff, just avoid it.

'ware: tread lightly.:
Evangelos Petroutsos, Mastering Visual Basic.NET (Sybex, 2002) It's hard to rate such a multiple-personality book as this one. Much of what is here is in error, or subject to interpretation, at the very least; something unforgivable in a programming book. And yet, when I need a quick reference or a refresher on how to do something basic, this is usually the first place I turn. So there IS some value to it, at least that's the way I see it, but I can't unhesitatingly recommend it for egregious editorial (one assumes) errors. This is certainly a book for those (like me) who have almost no familiarity with Visual Basic. I'd done a little program modifying a few years ago for my company, and had worked with a much, much earlier version of VB (2.0, for those of you who remember the stone age) a ways back, but my development knowledge lies in other areas. Petroutsos' book, combined with my knowledge of C++ and SQL, got me up to speed exceptionally quickly, but non-programmers picking this up as their first programming book are likely going to be extremely frustrated finding errors they don't know how to debug in the published code. But for the programming veteran who's just a novice to Visual Basic, there is likely a lot to be learned from this book. Just watch your step. ** 1/2