Customer Reviews
Great VB book for serious VB Programmers. 
2008-08-05
This is a great book.It has a lot of techniques that you would not normally use in your day to day programming tasks.It covers the language properly. Every chapter has actual code that works and that you could use in your projects.The author is definitely a master, and this book proves it.
The book helped me to pass the MS Exam 70-536, .Net Framework 2.0, Application Development Foundation. Most of the exam topics are covered in it.
The organization of the book is good, starts with the basics, slowly going to advanced topics.However I think this book is definitely not for beginners, they will get lost in some chapters.
Overall, I give it 5 stars, it is a great book, well written, well organized, a great reference that every VB programmer should read and have it on their shelf.
Good Book 2008-03-18
I had a case dealing with Version Tolerant Serialization, after searching the web; they all came up short. I double checked the book later, and found the answer I needed. That 1 time more than paid for this book.
a great book 2007-12-30
I made an international request for this book and in the ship info they told me that the delivery of this item would be delayed... but it didn't. i got this book sooner than expected.
it was a geat thing that i got this book before the estimated delivery date!!
thanks
amazon
Great book -- but probabably not for newbies 
2007-11-03
The things I like about this book are that the topics it covers are very well done. It covers some of the trickier aspects like threading and regular expressions. Being an experienced programmer I like the fact that you can jump around in the book to just the aspects of the language that you are interested. I will warn the novice programmer that this is probably not a good starter book, but if you are ready for the material you will find that it has a good balance of code examples, and explanation.
There are just a few spots in the code example where I can see a slightly better implementation, but if you are an experienced programmer this will not be difficult at all to see yourself.
Last but not least, the appendix is one of the beefiest one's I have seen in ANY programming book. If there is anything I hate about tech books is a lousy appendix and this one is top notch.
Excellent, monumental book - but not for everyone 2007-05-31
Visual Basic appeared more than 15 years ago as a tool to define quick prototypes and develop GUI applications with ease. Its development environment, which the language was literally blended in, was remarkably easy to use. I remember those good old days when a fellow colleague of mine showed me how to draw VB forms and in less than an hour after I was already developing a new GUI application.
Visual Basic has gone through a long way since then. The language is nowadays a powerful, complex, potent medium to develop sophisticated applications. In fact, Visual Basic.NET is virtually on par with C#.
"Visual Basic 2005: The Language" by Francesco Balena tries to show - in a gentle yet dense manner - the long way that VB has pursued over the years and well as the current state of affairs. It succeeds on both counts.
The book is divided in four bigs parts:
1) The Basics - which introduces the reader to what Visual Basic.NET is all about, with explicit references to the differences between VB6 and VB.NET (very useful for VB6 programmers).
2) Object Oriented Programming - which presents the OOP support in VB.NET. This section is important because VB.NET departs from the old OOP support and gets more in line with the .NET paradigm.
3) Working with the .NET Framework - which may be seen as a natural continuation of the previous part in the context of the .NET framework.
4) Advanced Topics - which tackles how advanced .NET elements (like attributes) get handled in VB.NET as well as what VB.NET is still better than, say, C# (namely the interop with COM and Automation).
The book is truly monumental in form and dense in content. The style is slightly verbose but this adds value: you cannot skip pages without losing valuable information and in such conditions reading a book of this size is quite a task.
As an added bonus, the author presents several mini-projects that are in fact mini how-to tutorials: how to build a plug-in for WinForms, how to develop a n-tier application. Without the generosity of Mr. Balena you'd have to buy an extra book for an introduction in such useful stuff.
"Visual Basic 2005" has several minor drawbacks, though:
1) The remarks showing the differences between VB6 and VB.NET are scattered throughout the text. For a VB6 programmer this is difficult to follow and for a non-VB6 programmer this is slightly annoying. Perhaps Mr. Balena should have dedicated a special chapter to those differences and then forget about them.
2) The book does not say much about all the other .NET languages, as if VB.NET is the only .NET language under the sun. In fact, .NET diminishes the differences between languages without making them identical. This is not apparent from this book.
3) The book does not say enough about what is specific to Visual Basic, besides syntax. Why would anyone want to program in Visual Basic.NET when you have C#? In my opinion, Visual Basic.NET is not going to go away any time soon especially because it retains those qualities of VB6 - a verbose and intuitive syntax, a loose typing system (perfect fit for Automation interop) as well as a slightly better exception catching mechanism. In my opinion, "Visual Basic 2005" does not elaborate enough on such necessary topics.
Overall, the book is a must if you want to come up to speed with the Visual Basic language after years of programming in other languages. However, if you want to learn Visual Basic from scratch or if you want to use Visual Basic.NET for more "mundane" tasks - such as building WinForm applications - then this book is not for you.
excellent book for experienced programmer 2007-05-19
Get the expert insights, indispensable reference, and practical instruction needed to exploit the core language features and capabilities in Visual Basic 2005. Well-known Visual Basic programming author Francesco Balena expertly guides you through the fundamentals, including modules, keywords, and inheritance, and builds your mastery of more-advanced topics such as delegates, assemblies, and My Namespace. Combining in-depth reference with extensive, hands-on code examples and best-practices advice, this CORE REFERENCE delivers the key resources you need to develop professional-level programming skills for smart clients and the Web.
Best book on VB.NET 2007-03-29
I have read through a few best selling VB.NET books and I believe this is the best book on the topic. The best part about this book is that it does not give the rehashed technical manual feeling that most other books would give you. Instead, you can tell the author had been planning to write this book for a while and he added many fine details about VB.NET and Framework which might have been puzzling you. However this book only comvers the core topics and there are some other fine details which are missed, so I recommend you reading together with Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer). That book gives you the rehashed feeling, though.
Very Good Reference 2007-03-27
If you are looking for a beginners book then go elsewhere. If you are looking for a very well written reference on the more advanced features of VB then this is your book. It covers all advanced aspects very well and has lots of sample code to assist you in your development efforts.
As a very experienced VC++ and STL developer switching to VB, I needed a reference on how to code my ideas in VB2005. This book was the best investment of the 5 books I have purchased on the system.
VB 6 TO VB 2005 With Ease 2007-03-15
I found this to be the best source I've read that reveals the code changes from VB 6 to 2005. The code samples explain in detail how to easily accomplish tasks in VB 2005.
What it covers it covers well 
2006-07-12
This book is outstanding for what it covers. It's a great reference for some core topics, as well as for techniques most programmers may never use, but just might. If you ever happen to need to use reflection or multithreading, for example, look no further than this book for a thorough explanation.
The author's style is elegant, though at times a bit too concise. Many sections I had to read over three or four times to really understand the material (e.g., the chapter on regular expressions). On the plus side, there were remarkably few typos, and practically all the code samples worked. The book clearly was written in an admirably painstaking, workmanlike fashion one could only wish for in a great many technical tomes.
The presentation was dry, typical of a "reference" work. It is better suited to looking up what you need for a particular project, rather than for reading cover to cover. I did read it cover to cover, however, because the book is practically a blueprint for the MCTS exam. I had to keep waking myself up to get through the advanced topics.
The main problem with this book is what it *doesn't* cover. As others have noted, there is nothing on ADO.NET nor ASP.NET. In addition there is nothing on XML, nothing on Windows forms and their component controls; I could go on. My point is, how can this be a core reference? Sure, you can get coverage of these topics in other books, but what if your budget is limited to one book? It would be nice if a "core" reference had at least some coverage of every core topic.
I intended to give this book 4 stars, but Amazon wouldn't let me edit my original selection of 3.
