This is an extremely handy collection of reference material covering many topics. It's well organized and easy to use. I find that browsing this book is easier than surfing the net for answers (most of the time).

This was an excellent first VS 2005 book. It had more than I expected with its drawing tutorials and various IDE settings.
Its a good refernce for new programmers and seasoned developers.

Answered many of the problem areas i had

This book has a lot more material in it than I expected from reading the Table of Contents. I am really glad I made this choice. It is very nicely organized with supporting subjects covered where needed. It also has real world experience suggestions throughout that will aid the programmer. The code examples are simple but effective and the descriptions of concepts are broad and carefully written. Visual Basic is extremely complex and this is a great source for the programmer. I would not refer to it as a reference book although some of that is there. It is a great walk-through of a lot of the aspects of writing Windows applications.

As a C-family programmer with a math background, I found the author's approach to presentation to be excellent: in 3 critical ways.

1) Unlike most VB books, he separates IDE (Integrated Devel. Env.) issues from the actual coding examples. In other words, while the IDE treatment is good, one needn't concern oneself with the IDE in order to understand the fundamental attributes - both syntactic and semantic - of the language. To put it as simply as possible: my objective was to know *what the code looks like, and what it does* as a language, not as a language-cum-development environment. (It's also worth noting that Visual Studio is *not* the only available development environment.)

2) The author spends a lot of time on definitions, and doesn't assume any pre-existing knowledge of the language. Syntax charts appear before presentation of any language construct, so that the reader can clearly see what options are available for that language construct *before* the author begins to actually describe the variations.

3) The examples rely on forms *only* when necessary. From what I can tell, most VB books are addressed to VB programmers - who seem to think of the entire language as being built around forms. (While this may be a historically understandable view, clearly it's inaccurate, given that it's possible to write form-independent and useful component code, such as for use in an ASP .NET application.)

Let me close by saying that after struggling through a number of VB books that were clearly oriented towards forms and/or holding the reader by the hand when it came to walking through the IDE in *every single example*, but were relatively weak when it came to the fundamental syntactic and semantic characteristics of the language, it was a pleasure to read this text, in which *definitions* and *semantics* came first!

If you are looking to have your hand held so you can walk through each example with the IDE, or seeking a "cookbook" that will tell you how to write such-and-such a routine, this may not be the right book for you. But as a programmer who has learned many languages, the first thing I want to know with any new language is: *how to write the code in plain text, and what the code I've written will actually do*.

After reading another Wrox tome (the title of which I won't mention), browsing at my local B&N, and consulting many possible resources on line, this is the best text that I've found which satisfies that seemingly simple-minded criterion. And at Amazon's excellent price, this is a bargain you can't afford to pass up!

Brushes off the cobwebs for all the basics that we all forget in the first chapters, and gradually brings you up to date on the new features. Delves deep in the latter chapters!

This is a doorstop size book that contains a lot of very useful information, explanation and guidance.

The author has an easy to read style, which doesn't avoid technical terms, but doesn't wallow in them just to impress you either. The book contains four main parts covering a wide range of VB2005 topics, plus a very useful set of Appendices.

Part 1:Visual Studio IDE.

I think there is always a dilemma for authors when describing the IDE. On the one hand, if they are not careful they end up producing a long boring list of toolbars, windows, menus, etc, which will soon have the reader nodding off over the book. On the other, if they describe each of these elements in detail, you would probably end up with a 1000 page book that never gets past the IDE description.

The author has walked the line between these two extremes, dropping in additional detail on key areas as necessary. For instance in the section on Project Properties and the Compile Tab, he makes use of the opportunity to reinforce the positive reasons for having Option Explicit and Option Strict turned on.

Similarly, he includes real world examples of how you might find particular Debug menu windows useful.

Part 2: Object Oriented Programming

The section on OOP contains a good introduction to key principles and practices in this area. Clear code samples to demonstrate points and useful diagrams to clarify the tricky areas all help demystify what can be a difficult subject for newcomers.
I particularly liked the detailed section on Collection Classes, but would have liked more on the relatively
new area of Generics .
As OOP is a topic that many Classic VB upgraders will have to get to grips with, this Part of the book will give them a useful introduction to the subject.

Part 3: Graphics.

This Part of the book is really excellent. If you have visited the VB-Helper web site you will know that Rod Stephens is an absolute master in this field and his skills shine through in this section.

He manages to explain a whole range of graphics topics very clearly - and not just the relatively easy stuff. Difficult techniques such as Transformations and Graphics Paths are well explained with description, code samples and screenshots.

I found that the downloadable sample code was particularly useful in this part as I was able to copy/paste and recycle some of the advanced examples for a project I was working on at the time.


Part 4: Interacting with the Environment.

This final Part includes coverage of a range of topics, including Configuration, Resources (much improved in VB2005), Streams, Useful Namespaces, and a wide review of File and IO issues.

Summary

It is clearly written. The Graphics section is extremely good. In fact it is the best coverage of the topic of GDI+ for VB.NET that I have yet seen.

Overall this is a good Programmer to Programmer level book which has plenty of code samples, clear narrative and comprehensive coverage of important topics. Apart from anything else, personally I think this book is worth the asking price just for the information contained in the Graphics Part alone.

This is easily the worse book about programming I have ever read. The book had nothing to do with real programming. The book was all about how to use Visual Studio, not how to program using Visual Basic. He starts off with the book with 70 pages about the IDE!! He does not get into OOP until Chapter 14 or 15, and the chapter is less than 10 pages!!

This book is not for programmers at all. I wanted to look at creating Custom Events. He talked about Delegates in Chapter 4, Events in Chapter 13, and Custom Events in Chapter 14. He went through a lot of talk (a lot) before he finally showed an example, and the example was not useful at all. I learned nothing about Custom Events, but I did waste over an hour of my time.

Very Very bad book. I returned it and will never buy a Wrox book again.

Good overview of a complex topic. There is much new in VB2005 compared to 2002 and 2003 and this covers these succinctly. The best part is his coverage of the printing capabilities in .NET. This is a very involved topic and it is well explained in the book including a method that I used to create a printing class that can handle printing a variety of different text blocks.

Of equal importance: when I had a problem with the printing routine, I went to the web site (www.wrox.com) and was able to discuss the problem directly with the author - this is invaluable to me as I am not a programmer by profession, but use VB.NET to write software for our anesthesiology practice. Mr. Stephens' responses were prompt and very useful.

Highly recommended.
Alan G. Mowbray
amowbray@charter.net

Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference is an outstanding text to a terrific new product from Microsoft. I am a non professional developer (General Practitioner writing medical practice software) and I had become bogged down with the complexities of printing and database programming in Visual Studio 2003. Visual Basic Express and this book have given me a real boost and my projects are moving ahead at last.

For me this book is just the right level. It doesn't assume your are an idiot or waste time on Windows basics. The 1058 pages (I have the electronic version) are full of concise explanations, just the right level of detail and hardly a page goes by without a relevent screen shot or code example (code is king!). There is a 6.7M zipped file of code samples that are full of really useful examples.

For anyone struggling with printing in Visual Basic 2005 then this is the one. For me the jewel in this book was code to easily print paragraphs and page numbers on multiple pages and I have slightly modified this to produce a little report writer to print paragraph chunks of text in any font, in any place and on multiple pages. I have struggled with this for so long. By far the best discussion of printing I have ever seen in a Visual Basic text.

Rod is very adept with handling graphics in VB and I have only touched on some of his routines for handling screen graphics. And a good introduction to OOP.

28 chapters and 18 appendices cover a lot of ground. As a bonus Rod has an excellent web site and a regular newsletter full of useful tips.

This is a terrific book. My opinion as an Aussie who finds it relaxing to write VB code is that you are unlikely to be disappointed and that it is a dinki-di bonzer book and you'd be a mug not to get it. Well that's my 2 bobs worth.

Another excellent masterpiece from Mr. Rod Stephen.
It is a magnificent assistant as much for the programmer as for any person
interested in to learn or to perfect their knowledge about Visual Basic 2005.
This book includes all and each one of the relative topics to Visual Basic 2005, although
some have not been treated in all their depth, due to the extensive of the language.
In short, this it is another book that will be added to the list of successes to which the author has us accustomed to.

My library is filled with books from Rod Stephens. As a Visual Basic programmer with over ten years of experience, I have consistantly used Mr. Stephens' books.

This book is a great addition to my library of programming books and I recommend it for anyone who is a VB programmer and wants to keep up todate with the latest tricks, tips, and features in VB.

This book is positioned somewhere between Beginner and Intermediate. It begins with Visual Studio's integrated development environment (ICE). If you've programed in something before, most of the concepts of the IDE and of the language itself will make sense to you and allow you to become productive quickly. I don't think it would matter which language you have used, just being a bit familiar with the programming concept is enough.

The book begins with a fairly quick overview or introduction to the IDE, the language and an introduction to programming. This lasts about a third of the book, maybe a bit more. At the end of this time you will have a good overview of the language. Part II of the book covers object oriented concepts, classes, structures, namespaces, collection classes, generics. Part III is called graphics, but it also includes things like printing and producing reports using Crystal Reports. Part IV is called Interacting with the Environment and is on using external resources such as the system registry, files, streaming data and so on. By the end of Part IV, you will be a fairly accomplished programmer.

The last third of the book is a series of appendicies. These provide a concise reference book for the language. This is a convenient way to combine the tutorial approach with the reference book approach that will give the book greater usefulness as you actually work in the language.