Visual Basic.NET Primer Plus [Paperback]

I would recommend this book to EVERYONE!! I already had a book on VB.NET, and regret that this book wasn't published earlier! The other book that I had on VB.NET had chapters that were as long as 50-70 pages, and very tedious to read. In this book, the author seems to be kind to the reader!! Each chapter is short enough to be interesting, and full of useful information and easily readable - the author has done a great job at explaining the topics with an interesting and engaging tone to the explanations. Each topic is broken down into manageable sizes, so that too much information is not packed into a single chapter making it overwhelming and tedious to read. For example, the concepts of encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism are usually squished into one endless chapter in other books, but this one has three separate chapters on each topic, with detailed information and interesting examples.
One of the strong points I found about this book is that it is full of useful illustrations which keep our interest in the topic. There were some diagrams which helped me understand extremely complex and difficult concepts in a matter of minutes - just by the way they were perfectly illustrated. For example, the concept of accessing a database using ADO.NET seemed very overwhelming to me after reading it in my previous book. But this book has a great illustration - a simple-to-understand flow diagram, which explains how the connection object, the data adapter object and the dataset object are interconnected and function to access the database - the whole concept seemed to dawn on me in a moment!
I think I also benefited a lot after going through the Review Questions at the end of each chapter. These questions encompass all the concepts covered in the chapter, and provide us with close to "real-life" examples, which are much better than the dull case-studies, which present a single-sided perspective.
Additionally, the language used by the author is not dull and boring - you feel like the author is having a conversation with you, which helps you sustain your interest in reading the book!
Another aspect of this book that I admired was the fact that the author has not written this book as a technical manual of VB.NET, but has also included ways in which a person can start thinking as a programmer! For example, the five programming steps that the author recommends can be utilized in any programming environment. In short, while reading this book, you don't feel like you are listening to a dull technical explanation, but to a person who is interested in conveying to you the invaluable knowledge of programming as well as the skills of VB.NET. I am very glad that I bought this book, and would recommend it to everyone - I am sure that even people who have no interest in programming will develop an interest for it - and people who already love programming will be glad that they are in the right field!

This is the first VB.Net book I've found that really explains the language. I own about 8 other VB.Net books and I'm constantly asking questions like, "why am I typing ByVal and what does it mean?," or "what's really happening when I call a function?" So many of the books I currently own have left me with too many unanswered questions. I'd be willing to bet that as he wrote this book, Purdum was constantly asking himself what kinds of questions the reader would ask. Every new concept is given a thorough explanation. The book gets very detailed about how things work in VB.Net, but it is written so well it is easly understood by a beginner. Purdum definitely doesn't gloss over anything.

If I had to purchase just one VB.Net book as a beginner, this book would be it. I do wish there were more programming exercises, but if you are creative, you can make up your own...