Visual Basic Programmer's Reference

By Rod Stephens

2005

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764571982
• ISBN13: 9780764571985
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John
• Length: 1056 Pages
• Weight: 3.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 7.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Well written and intuitively organized

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.

Excellent VB2005 Refernce

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

Outstanding

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.

Positioned just above the absolute beginner

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.