Object Oriented Programming with Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# Step by Step [Paperback]

If you are new to objects, this book will show you why object programmers swear by the approach--it really does make it easier to write scalable, reusable code. It also helps the developer avoid the "house of cards" syndrome as a program grows beyond its original scope.

If you have had plenty of object theory, but struggle to translate objects to code, this book will get you over the hump. Examples show how to implement inheritance, acggregation, and association.

I would recommend starting with this book, then reading Rosenberg, "Use Case Driven Object Modeling With UML", which teaches an object-oriented development process. Fowler, "UML Distilled" is another great text. Finally, dig into Gamma et al (the "Gang of Four"), "Design Patterns". These books really will change the way you code.

Postscript: Having worked through the examples in the first half of the book, I continue to be impressed. Reynolds-Haertle does a very nice job of illustrating most of the constructs one uses to get day-to-day jobs done. For example, she includes several examples of collections built with the .Net ArrayList construct. Later, she shows an example of a collection built with a Dictionary construct, and discusses benefits and drawbacks of each type. If you are a VBer who (like me) is somewhat bewildered by the collection classes in .Net, this book does a very nice job sorting them out.

The Good

I chose this book for a class in object-oriented programming that I gave in November 2002. For the most part, I was very pleased with this book, and the feedback I received about it from my students was positive as well. The author did a good job of explaining the concepts clearly and concisely, and most of the book is dedicated to the step-by-step completion of hands-on exercises. For this particular class, I relied on the book for most of the instruction and hands-on portions, and I found that this book worked very well for a one week long class. I personally thought that it was very useful to have both Visual Basic and C# examples side-by-side in the book. However, I did notice that when typing in the labs from the book, students often would type the VB code instead of the C# (C# was the language used for this particular class).

The fact that the examples all worked and were very clearly explained in the text both were huge positives for me. If I were teaching the class over again, I think I would definitely choose this book once more. If I were a student looking to learn object-oriented programming by example, then this would be a good book to pick up. If I wanted to learn more about the design and theory behind of OOP, another book would probably be a better choice.

The Less Good

There were only a few things about this book that I didn't care for or that I received negative feedback from students on. The first one isn't the book's fault at all, and that is the fact that all of the examples are for windows forms. As an ASP.NET programmer myself, I would have preferred to have seen the book use ASP.NET for more of its examples. This was a very minor complaint, however. Also, although I very much liked the support for both VB and C#, I think that something should be done within the text to ensure that the C# and VB code samples are set apart more obviously. Many students were confused by this and would end up looking at or even typing in the wrong code for examples because the VB and C# code was interspersed without much visual separation.

The single biggest complain I received from students about the text was that the examples were very difficult to relate to. These were IT workers with experience building ASP and VB applications, and they were disappointed by the samples because they did not correspond to anything that they could see themselves writing in the workplace. The bank account samples were the exception to this, and were well-received, but the card games and vector algebra applications ended up detracting from students' abilities to grasp the concepts involved because they were too busy trying to figure out what the game or mathematical program was doing. A greater focus on business problem domain examples would have helped many of my students, I think, to relate to the topics being described by the examples.

I highly recommend you use the CD that comes with this book only for the .bmp's & .mdb referenced in the examples. Typing the examples is a great way to learn these concepts.

And speaking of the concepts... I've been a VB'er since version 3. .NET brings a completely new way of thinking to VB development, and that makes this book a must. The OO concepts are taught well in this book, and I didn't notice any 'legacy' thinking anywhere.

Hidden thoughout this book is a brief lesson on UML, and the last chapter does a great job of introducing coding standards recommended for .NET... which are quite different from previous versions.

Another benefit of this book is that it shows VB & C# examples next to each other. Even if you've never coded in C, it's facinating to see how close VB is now to C in the .NET domain. I didn't do the C# exercises, but I'd guess this is about the best way a VB developer could pick up the basics of C#.

One more plug: Each chapter has a time estimate on the first page. I found this great for self goal-setting. Since I did one chapter each night after work, it was nice to know what time I could expect to finish. It helped me stay motivated throughout.