The bad: The reason the book is small is because there is a tremendous lack of depth to the content. Perhaps the book is so easy to understand is because they say the same things over and over again. The next sentence of this review talks about how often the author(s) reference something that will be talked about next. The author(s) reference something that will be talked about next a lot! Very annoying and adds to the pagecount. Cut that stuff out, and cut out the repeated sections of HTML (which are the same) for both C# and VB.NET code, and the book would probably be reduced by 40%. Then they could add more depth and more examples to each class. Another annoyance is coding convention, or lack thereof. I realize it's inconsequential to the functionality that the code can be written in whatever mixture of upper and lower-case, but isn't it good practice to stick to a standard and be consistent? Obviously, the writers could care less about this as well. Maybe I'm used to books in which the authors have a little bit better programming discipline in regards to how they write their code.