So, for this simple reason, this book is worthwhile. It has easy to follow examples that tell "how to."

I have been fighting permissions in order to use MSDE for over a month now, and the MS Examples and directions on how to correct for the permission settings, (found three completely different sets, none of which work) and was hoping this book might address the issue. It does not. (The MS examples that do work on the help disk, will not open because "I" do not have the correct permissions on my own computer, so I cannot see how they did it.) I was hoping this book would address this, but it did not.

All and all, there is considerable evidence that the author shot through this book as quickly as possible. It took me over a month to read the book by Francesco Balena "Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, (and I am still not quite done) and only a day to read through this book.

Still, it does have its place, and I would recommend that if you are just starting the transistion to VB.net and you have a good solid book or two for spending countless hours trying to figure stuff out, that this would be a good third book for just showing you how to do something. It can save a lot of hours sometimes.

For example, in Francesco's book, I wanted to run a code example from page twelve hundred and something. It is missing the imports statements, and I know that somewhere in the preceeding 1200 pages there is a phrase that tells me what I am missing. It is very frustrating, and this book is very refreshing in its simplistic approach to things. Easy.

So, you won't learn much from it, but if you are trying to do something that this book covers, I think it could be a handy resource that would keep you from otherwise going through hundreds of pages looking for dangling references, and "implicit" things that you are "supposed to know."

I would have given it four stars if the Database stuff had been better. It assumes that you have SQL Server 7.0 and then it goes into a snap-in to do things, for an entire chapter. Those of us trying to use MSDE or Access are still out in the cold on this book, though it does touch on it briefly for ODBC data binding. Overall all though, if you want a How to book that tells the database stuff, keep looking, the author took too many shortcuts, and there is still too much not covered on the topic, UNLESS you are using SQL Server 7.0

There are several useful chapters that I haven't seen covered anywhere else, such as some good detail on editing the web.config and form level and windows level authentication as well as tracing and caching. Also there is some useful stuff on how to setup a web service and finally there is also some useful stuff on object persistence.

If there hadn't been so many shortcuts taken on the database related stuff I would give this more stars, maybe even five, if I had rated it based on the niche it is trying to fill.

Anyway, lots of useful stuff, that is not found in other books, and presented in a way that is very easy to follow.