Visual Basic .NET Black Book is a comprehensive reference and problem-solving guide for Visual Basic programmers. It covers Visual Basic .NET tips, examples, and how-to's on everything from programming to managing Visual Basic applications. It provides in-depth material on the new object-oriented features of Visual Basic .NET. Plus readers will learn the crucial Visual Basic tool set in detail including best Visual Basic programming practices, from design tools to flowcharts. Using the popular Black Book format, this book provides in-depth analyses of VB.NET technologies and hundreds of immediate programming solutions making it an invaluable desktop companion.
User reviewGreat book
This book is excellent. One of the best I've seen. Loads of examples, good explanations, far more detail than I've seen other places. Answers nearly all of my questions. I recommend it to anyone!
User reviewCould be better!
This book is a OK book. I would buy `Programming visual basic.net (Core References) by Francesco Balena instead of this book. It fails in alot of areas to explain anything! Hey, I have heard good things in the past about the black book series, but don't waste your money on this one!
User reviewGreat for Beginners to Mid Level Experienced Programmers
Being a programmer with 3 years experience and developing in VB6.0. I found this book to be a great reference book for me while I began learning VB.NET. I would ask myself while developing,, 'I can develop feature 'x' in VB6.0, so how does VB.NET handle 'x',, and look it up'
The Black Book doesn't dive into the philosophies of VB.NET, but rather delivers straight forward code examples of how to do it. For grunt programming and experienced VB6.0 developers, I feel this book is a must on every developers book shelf.
User review
Good
The book is good for both experienced programmers and beginners. What I was looking well into was the ADO.Net chapters and they are very good.
I have more than 6 years of Delphi experience and this book was good for me to begin with and as reference.
User review
Good but bloated
If you deduct from this book everything that you can find in the Help files and a whole lot of unecessary code it would number a few hundred pages instead of the massive 1144 pages that it is.
I am an experienced developer and want something more than a (very good) manual. Perhaps it would suit a beginner better.
An example of code-bloat was a section on adding a data adapter to a form. The author describes a simple drag-and-drop approach but then proceeds to list the code generated behind the scenes - all 10 pages of it. You can see this for yourself on the screen if you have followed the example, and it is not even accompanied by any explanations.
Depsite it's size it wasn't always thorough. I wanted to find out what were acceptable values for the DataSource property of a ListBox but the property was not even shown in the list of 'noteworthy public properties' of the object, nor in the index.
It does however contain a great deal of information on all aspects of VB.NET which makes it useful for a reference book.
