Rating: 4 out of 5
Good could be better
Overall a good book.I like the hands-on style of explaining things. The author does not give you wooden definitions but talks in a practical manner. e.g. "A constructor is block of code that executes when you use the new keyword to create an instance of a class." I ve never read such a clear and to the point explanation of a constructor before. The text is full of tips and established practices that I found particularly helpfull. The negative is that lots of things are not explained. The logic and whys behind some of the code are simply missing, which is a shame since the author is a skillful one. This book could easily get a 5 star rating if it were not for this. I d actually give 3,5. I haven't read other books on OOP and .NET but I think this one is worth its money.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Excellent for VBers moving to DotNet
This book is an excellent tutorial for VBers who are moving to DotNet and who want to break all the bad habits picked up over the years. I have, by the way, just described myself. The book does a very good job bringing object theory down to earth and showing how to implement objects in both VB.Net and C#. If you are new to objects, this book will show you why object programmers swear by the approach--it really does make it easier to write scalable, reusable code. It also helps the developer avoid the "house of cards" syndrome as a program grows beyond its original scope. If you have had plenty of object theory, but struggle to translate objects to code, this book will get you over the hump. Examples show how to implement inheritance, acggregation, and association. I would recommend starting with this book, then reading Rosenberg, "Use Case Driven Object Modeling With UML", which teaches an object-oriented development process. Fowler, "UML Distilled" is another great text. Finally, dig into Gamma et al (the "Gang of Four"), "Design Patterns". These books really will change the way you code. Postscript: Having worked through the examples in the first half of the book, I continue to be impressed. Reynolds-Haertle does a very nice job of illustrating most of the constructs one uses to get day-to-day jobs done. For example, she includes several examples of collections built with the .Net ArrayList construct. Later, she shows an example of a collection built with a Dictionary construct, and discusses benefits and drawbacks of each type. If you are a VBer who (like me) is somewhat bewildered by the collection classes in .Net, this book does a very nice job sorting them out.
Rating: 3 out of 5
good and bad. I recommend another book in addition to this
Not a bad book. Just typing the code, without reading all of the explanations, helped me piece together what was being illustrated, and that's a big plus. I come from vb background and have been programmer for many years. On the minus, there were certain pieces of code which were not clear (for example, using of shared members without introducing what shared members were). Some examples did not work on my computer, although the folks at experts-exchange.com were able to help me. The book does have syntax errors but microsoft has not made public any fixes to the book material. The books starts to use very many complex objects, such as drawing objects, etc. without introducing them. In practical, day to day programming, you will not likely need to use drawing objects. It would have been nice to not use these objects to illustrate the concepts being presented. Some of the objects at the end of the book seemed very complex...there seemed to be lack of clarity about getting a stream and assigning a stream etc. when demonstrating usage of ado.net. Any objects used by the author should have been first introduced, and explained to the reader, in detail. The author did not do this. Still, just typing all the code and going through the exercizes, I did learn "alot" -- well, you know how the computer field is, "alot" is a relative term; there's so much more to learn than this to prepare for the .net world. I recommend Murach's vb.net database programming with ado.net. Haven't read it yet, but it seems to have excellent reviews and covers just about everything that you will need to know as a vb.net/asp web developer...
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