The book is application based, which means that in each chapter you either build or enhance an application from the ground up. This is a great way to see how the concepts translate into reality. You also have to run the programs, so likely there will be the inevitable debugging problems (which is good to get used to if you want to program).

It's slow paced, as it should be for the beginner. There are entire chapters devoted to text boxes and variables and checkboxes. To give you an idea of the pace, Control structures don't appear until chapter 10 (200 pages into the book); Classes and Objects aren't discussed until chapter 19 (400 pages into the book), and Database programming doesn't come along until chapter 25 (almost 600 pages into the book). If you're hoping to learn VB.NET quickly, this is not the book for you. This book is for the programmer who wants mounds and mounds of detail. Persistence will pay off, and when you've eyed the final text on page 752 you'll be well versed in the basics of the Visual Studio.NET IDE and the Visual Basic.NET language (including the basics of Object-Oriented programming and the .NET class libraries). There are even 4 chapters dedicated to ASP.NET to give you a taste of the web programming capabilities of Visual Studio.NET.

I read this book for a refresher (I have previous experience in Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic.NET) and I was able to complete about 2-3 tutorials from the book per day, which computes into less than a month's time investment. Now I feel pretty confident that I have the fundamentals down.

If you're new to programming, or if you want a back-to-the-basics VB.NET book, this one is a good read.