"Addressing various business applications, the authors discuss the programming topics needed to implement those applications and provide simple, short, complete examples. Chapter 2 emphasizes how quickly readers can design Windows-based user interfaces." — Narges Kasiri, Oklahoma State University
"A well written, authoritative textbook for all those who want to learn Visual Basic programming from the ground up." — Dr. Hamid R. Nemati, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
"Contains the information a non-programmer needs to become a master Visual Basic programmer. Excellent code examples." — Jeffrey P. Scott, Blackhawk Technical College
"This book teaches you everything you need to know to build great applications the right way." — Joe Stagner, Microsoft
Customer Reviews & Comments
Totally reorganized from the 2008 edition, you only get the elementary chapters. The other 2/3 of the material lives on line. You have to download chapters individually and either read them on your computer / eReader as Protected PDFs, which you cannot annotate, or print them out (hundreds of pages). The author's ordeal of reordering the material resulted in references to the wrong chapter in their text. The writing is overly dense and broken up by pages of code, followed by attempts to explain what is going on in the code. It would probably be crystal clear if you already knew everything about VB, but that is not the point of a textbook. The only nice thing is that key terms are highlighted in blue, to make it easy to find their sometimes clear, sometimes recursive explanations of complex concepts. The at the end of each chapter, a brief index mentions key terms covered, but does not bother to tell you where to find the referenced concept. Try finding it in the index at the back of the book. For a Javascript/ASP/PHP class we used another Deitel book, Internet and World Wide Web How to Program. Same problems: too many concepts with too little context. Unlike Wrox, they do not know how to explain things simply and provide context. A bunch of code does not context make. Context is something that reader can grasp and relate to the new concepts, finding where to put them on the map. If you don't have to buy the book for a class, I would recommend saving your money for something that offers more value.
