Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! [With CDROM]

by Patrice Pelland

Build your own Web browser, desktop weather station, or other cool application--without any programming experience Featuring learn-by-doing projects and plenty of visual examples, this hands-on book... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735622132
• ISBN13: 9780735622135
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Microsoft Press
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.9" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Can be downloaded for free

The "Build a Program Now" series, for VB, C# etc can be downloaded for free, when you register the copy of your language, which you can also download free at the microsoft web site. Why to spend money for this book if you can download it for free?

Good Cookbook

This book actually helped me quite a bit. It is strictly a cookbook with step by step instructions for building several programs. I found the detailed instructions for binding controls on a form to an underlying database very helpful. Once that program is working, it is easy to modify it to get a better understanding of how to code SQL statements in VB and get them to properly interact with the database. The book assumes that you are reasonably familiar with using VS to build forms. It does highlight several useful tricks that I had not seen in the other half-dozen or so books I have on VB. You will need other books to cover the details of VB, but this one is a useful introduction.

Not bad but if you look you will find better.

I have done a little C and some FORTARN programming and I wanted to check out VB since I have heard that it was an easy language to learn. It is and overall this really isn't a bad book if you have never programmed before. The examples are easy and you are walked through them step by step. What you are doing is also explained but only what you need to know to build the program, very little else. But you are encouraged to explore the program on your own to get a feel for it. As far as programming goes MS VB2005 really takes most of the coding out of it and you just have to add your buttons and text via drag and drop. If you want to make simple programs this is a good start but you will definately want a (much) more advanced book if you want to do anything with any substance. And should you want to move on to C# or C++ in the future you can still use this book. I checked out the C# book in a store and with only a few exceptions it is the exact same as this, right down to the text and examples. I was going to give this 3 stars but it does an excellent job of bringing the beginner with little or no programming experience up to speed to start writing simple programs, and it does it better than several other books I looked at.

An excellent introduction to Visual Basic 2005 Express

The examples in the book are great. Starting with a simple console application to add two numbers might seem silly, but it makes sense in Visual Basic 2005 because you can't just start typing -- you have to start somewhere in particular, and you need to know how to do that. Following that, you build a Windows application to add two numbers, an applicatoin to use the web browser control, a database application, and an application that retrieves data from a web service. Each example builds nicely on the one before, and they're functional enough to be useful in their own right. As important as the examples is what you learn along the way about the tools that make up the Visual Basic 2005 system. The book shows how simple it is to use the built-in components in Visual Basic 2005 to add features and functions to your application including forms, buttons, menus, toolbars, a splash screen, an about box, web services and database connections. This is where the book really shines. It shows you very clearly how to take advantage of the time (and work!) saving features of the system. The book is pretty good at explaining how to design a form. Form design was just awful in previous versions of Visual Basic, but the book clearly explains the new features that make it a little easier. The system is still not perfect - you can't automatically create three equally spaced textboxes (input fields), for example -- but that's not the fault of this book. The book also does a good job explaining the mechanics of starting a project, building applications and libraries, debugging, and "publishing" your application. "Publishing" is what Microsoft calls the process of turning your completed program into an installer which anyone can run to install your program. There's also an excellent introduction to database tables and how to create and use them within the system. As you work through the examples in the book, you can really feel yourself gaining momentum. The flip-side of this is that as you go through the book, you get less and less explanation for larger and larger chunks of code. The largest single piece of code is 56 lines long. In context, it's presented clearly enough that it's still easy to digest. One way of measuring the success of an introductory book like this is whether it gives you the confidence to keep going on your own, and I think this book does just that. But what if you're new to programming? If you're an absolute beginner, this book won't teach you how to program in Visual Basic. For example, the book never mentions structures or recursion. You can't do any serious programming just with what you'll learn about programming from this book, but that's not its purpose. The instructions in this book ARE clear enough that you'll be able to follow along, but if you want to get the most out of this book you'll have to spend some extra time working through the examples and with learning the language, even if it's only via the online

Excellent intro to VB2005 Express Edition

This is not a comprehensive programming guide; rather it is an introduction to Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. Like many other tutorials, the author builds on an application from start to finish to demonstrate the new features in VS2005/VB2005EE. The text is well written and easy to follow. The downside is that many of the links to MSDN are already outdated and it would have been better to include that info in the book directly, rather than relying on changeable internet content.