Allow me to begin by stating that while I am an experienced Basic programer, I am a beginner to Visual Basic.NET. This is the background from which I write this review. My understanding of Basic programing in general gives me some advantages which someone totally NEW to programing will not share.The trouble with many books on Visual Basic is that they focus so strongly on fundamentals that you never get to the fun stuff until very late.
For example, I bought a different book; 'Visual Basic.NET How to Program', by Deitel as my introduction to VB.NET. (Please note: If you have NO experience in Basic, the Deitel book is not for you.) The book is wonderful. It goes into great detail on the topics and is information-dense. But it is a dry read doesn't get to the FUN stuff, like timers and simple graphics until late in the book. After pouring over that book for the better part of a week, I was ready for a break. I wanted to do some FUN stuff!!
Browsing over the selection at the book store I finally settled on 'Visual Basic .NET Programming for the absolute beginner'. This book has many strong points and a few flaws. The flaws have been spelled out by other reviewers, so let me focus on some of the things I really liked.
First, if you read many VB book reviews you will see that a common complaint is that a book was written using a beta version of Basic .NET and that the examples do not work, or do not work well with the final release. This book does not seem to suffer from that flaw. That is GOOD!!
Second, the author has a great writing style which is a refreshing break from the rather dry text of my main instructional book. The author gives some excellent explanations on important core concepts, such as classes, inheritance and OOP. I found the second perspective on these topics very helpful to my understanding of them.
Third, the author does some Fun Stuff. You will learn, through the example of an arcade game how to use a timer to control events in a program. This knowledge will give you the keys for implementing your own ideas, be it writing a savings calculator which actively shows your hypothetical savings as they grow month after month and year after year, or writing your own graphing-programs which plot in real time.
The author also covers sequential and random access files, which are an important function for many programs.
My main lament is that the book does not cover page flipping, sprites, collision detection and buffered screens. For any book supposedly focusing on game programing, this is a serious lapse to my way of thinking.
Still, the author probably left those topics out because the book was supposed to be aimed at beginners, but this is no book for beginners! You are going to need some VB experience if you hope to get any real benefit from this book, so the absence of those fundamental programming topics is keenly felt.
That having been said, I am not being fair in faulting this book for failing to be what it was never intended to be so my complaint is neither relevant nor valid.
The intent of the book was a good one; to be a fun introduction to Basic .Net for the absolute beginner. But the authors good intentions may have been sunk by an aggressive editor and/or other publishing constraints (price or page count). That is too bad. This could have been a 5 star beginners book (or a 10 star gamers book!)
Conclusion: Here is a good complimentary book to your main VB.NET studies, but definitely not a stand alone text. If you are on a budget and totally new to Visual Basic. NET, this is not the book for you. If you have some Visual Basic experience and are looking for some fun and another perspective on key topics, you could do worse than to buy 'Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programming for the absolute beginner'.
...I liked its approach of using games and "fun" lessons for teaching Visual Basic. I've already completed SAMS "Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 24 Hours" so I'm not the "Absolute Beginner" that is the target audience of this book. With that in mind:1) This book is NOT for the absolute beginner. There is little if any discussion on how to use Visual Basic/Studio at all. No handholding at all. Often, items are mentioned only in passing (like how to do comments in your code) with little explanation. It seems an effort was made to make the book less intimidating by keeping it under 350 pages. The net result is a book with far too little explanation and information.
2) Throughout the book, when it comes time to add controls to your programs, you're simply given a chart listing all the controls and *some* of the properties you have to set. So what's the problem? The chart doesn't list any of the size or placement properties for the control! So you constantly have to flip back to the screenshot of the program - usually several pages earlier - to give yourself some idea where the item is supposed to go and how big it's supposed to be. In another example, in the animation program from chapter 3, you're supposed to assign a picture to 9 image controls. Problem? You're never told the NAMES of the picture files to assign! The author simply says that the images can be found on the CD with the book. Only they're not there! They're included as one large bitmap file on the CD which won't work for the program being worked on!
3) Code errors - in chapter 3, the author twice makes mention of using a particular Boolean variable in his program, making sure to allocate it by using "Dim". The problem? It's never used! All he does is allocate it, it never gets put to use!
4) Also in chapter 3, the author mentions the "Keydown event, which you've already seen earlier". I couldn't remember seeing it earlier, so I looked in the index. Turns out that "Keydown" is discussed only once in the book - IN THE SENTENCE THAT SAYS IT WAS DISCUSSED EARLIER.
That said, there are some good things to be gained from this book, as the author uses some events and controls that other beginning books don't touch as relate to games, so that's good. But if you're a true beginner, forget it.
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