With this book, you can learn the skills of a professional programmer in just 692 pages. Because of its self-paced approach in the first 7 chapters, you can do that whether you're new to Visual Basic.NET or you're upgranding from Visual Basic 6.
From that point on, you're ready for rapid progress as you learn how to develop sophisticated GUIs, how to use the .NET classes for a wide variety of purposes, how to work with XML, how to develop database appplications with ADO.NET, and how to develop web applications with ASP.NET.
To insure success, this book includes 18 complete business applications so you can see how the forms, controls, and code of Visual Basic applications work together. Applications like these should be a standard part of all programming books. BUT NO OTHER VB BOOK DOES THIS.
Here are 4 ways that our instructional approach insures your success:
To help you learn how to develop applications at a professional level, this book presents 18 business applications as examples. That way, you can see the relationships between the Visual Basic code, objects, properties, methods, and events that an application requires, which is essential to your understanding. In contrast, most competing books present trivial applications that have little resemblance to applications in the real world, and that limits your learning potential.
To solidify your skills, the exercises at the end of each chapter guide you through the development of some of the book’s applications. They also encourage you to experiment and challenge you to apply what you’ve learned in new ways. To give you a maximum amount of practice in a minimum amount of time, you start many of these exercises from partial applications that you download from our web site.
To help you learn more by reading less, all of the information in this book is presented in "paired pages" with the essential syntax, guidelines, and examples on the righthand page and the perspective and extra explanation on the left. Programmers tell us how much they like this approach because it lets them quickly find what they’re looking for. This is particularly useful for a language like Visual Basic because you simply can’t remember the hundreds of details that are required for effective programming.
After you read the first section of this book plus chapter 8, you can read the chapters in section 2, 3, 4, or 5. In other words, you don’t have to read all 20 chapters in sequence. We refer to this as "modular organization," and it lets you get the training you need when you need it. Yes, there are some contingencies between some of the chapters, but we let you know about them whenever they’re critical.
