Books for/about - vb net

Build Your Own ASP.NET Website Using C# & VB.NET (Build Your Own)

Publisher: SitePoint Pty Ltd
Authors: Zak Ruvalcaba

ISBN: 0957921861
List Price: $44.95
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 3
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Summary: A different approach.
Projects in this book fail to utilize the GUI in Visual Studio or even vb.net. From a business programming standpoint, Zak's approach is not as efficient as developing in VS.NET. The entire book walks you through coding in the old ASP format - using a text editor and hand typing the code. Most of your code is exposed when you view the source code on the website. If you use vs.net, the server side coding is removed when a page is posted back to the client.

The biggest loss in using this book is the fact that, by not using Visual Studio, the Intelligent coding feature is not exposed to the user. This is a tremendous help at times.

If you enjoy typing, this book is for you by all means. It uses the old approach and doesn't take advantage of VS' advanced GUI. Sure there is more overhead but processing power is cheap nowadays. It's well worth the trade off.

Summary: Fantastic book for beginners
I am pretty well versed in HTML and Javascript coding. I wanted to learn ASP.NET coding and this book was fantastic. What I liked about it was it taught me by walking me through building an actual website from beginning to end.

Each chapter deals with a different subject that builds on what you learned in the previous chapters. After the author lists the code, he goes over every line and explains what each one does and why. This was fantastic as you get to see the code twice and really get it ingrained in your head.

I would suggest this book to anyone new to ASP.NET as it has really given me a good grasp of the technology. Now I need to find a more advanced book to further my skills.

Summary: Best Introduction to .NET
I have been developing software for years. I have been programming in VB since 1991 and BASIC since 1978. I know many old languages like Assembly, Fortran and COBOL, but I have been hesitant to take the time to learn the new VB.NET and have figured C# would have been too hard. That is not the case and this book has made it easy. I read some reviews here on Amazon from other developers who thought the book had too much easy things in the first few chapters, but that is what makes it so good. By the end of the book, you are definitely wanting more meat and are ready to buy the next level of learning book, but you know the core of both languages. Although the accompanying website for the book has all of the code for download, I made sure I typed in all of the code. I did VB.NET first, then C#. By the second or third example, I was able to code the C# example without looking at the book from just seeing the VB.NET example. C# is very similar to VB.NET making it VERY EASY to learn. I definitely recommend this book! If you haven't delved into .NET yet, this is absolutely the best first book you could buy. Thihnk of this as the 101 college intro class to .NET. All other books will become easy after you read this one. The book claims that it was written with both the developer and non-developer in mind. I would have to say that I definitely believe a non-developer could follow it and learn the languages.

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Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: Jeffrey Friedl

ISBN: 0596002890
List Price: $39.95
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Summary: No summary or synopsis, only good for thorough detail.
Get the small pocket reference guide instead of this book! It is difficult to find what you want if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. I admit it covers the subject very well, but if you don't know Regular Expressions thoroughly, you have to read every word of the book or look forever to find what you want. Just buy the pocket reference guide and go to the library once a year when you need this thing.

Summary: The regex bible
The only book to explain regular expression in a clear and exhaustive manner, covering differences between the most important programming language in which regex are used.

A "must have".

Summary: Great Regex Book
I have known about regular expressions for a long time, but they have always been some kind of mysterious secret code. Recently I was reading something else that pointed out the power of regular expressions, so I decided it was time to learn regular expressions once and for all. After reviewing the available books on Amazon, I chose this one. I was not disappointed.

After reading just the first few chapters, I have been able to put them to work and make my life a lot easier. As a software engineer, I'm always doing searches through code or search/replace operations. I am now able to do more precise searches and do search/replace operations I never dreamed were possible before.

Learn regular expressions now! Get this book!

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	Programming Visual Basic 2005 Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Authors: Jesse Liberty
ISBN: 0596009496 List Price: $39.95 Amazon Price: $26.37 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: Jesse Liberty is the "Jesse Ventura" of programming Oh how I wished I had Jesse as a teacher when I was going through my college years. Very easy to understand and has a very "cool" sense of humor. He makes even the mundane "fun". Great book for all levels of programmers, there is something for everyone. BTW, this is my first O'Reilly book, I will be looking for other "Jesse" books, I am very satisfied. Summary: Wide ranging 2005 update Don't expect a complete reference with this book. In this book you will find out what's new and augment what you already know about the framework. That being said, this is a solid book that is written for the professional developer. There are few illustrations, but the screenshots are good, and the code fragments are kept focused on illustrating the key points in the text. Summary: crash course to .net 2.0 windows forms programming For a Jesse Liberty Book I have to admit that this book is a tough read since you are forced to read the text in the book to understand the examples. Having been a vb6 middle tier programmer for years and not really too familiar with windows programming in .net I am impressed that mr. liberty did not pass any framework .net 1.1 examples off as 2.0 in this latest vb.net 2.0 book as I have see in other books. His step by step in explaining and demos in custom control makes the book a very worthwhile read. The validation controls was a good introduction as was the personalization. I would have liked his book to go into more depth in databinding with datacontrols and web parts whilst removing vb.net 2005 fundamental chapters, GDI and mouse font chapters. His book does not really cover web services in depth, however he has mentioned that his asp.net 2.0 book will be out soon. This book did not feel like an intro book although someone familiar with .net framework 1.1 basics can go through this book without problems whilst reading his explanations. This is a good book if you wish to develop windows apps in .net 2.0 and I plan to use it as a reference. There is definetly alot of features to learn from this book. If you are after a book which implements OO or architecture patterns for middle tier programming you will need to look elsewhere. Summary:

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Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0

Publisher: Packt Publishing
Authors: Daniel N. Egan

ISBN: 1904811272
List Price: $39.99
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Summary: Excellent book
If you are looking to get up to speed to quickly on DotNetNuke this is the book for you. It covers virtually everything you need to know in under 300 pages. The writing is concise and explains the concepts clearly. It covers installation, administration, security, deployment, site creation and all of the basic built in DotNetNuke modules.

If you are interested in delving into customization and architecture it offers excellent chapters on core architecture, skinning and custom modules.

After reading the chapters on installation and basic concepts I was able to install DotNetNuke and create a number of standard modules on a test site in less than an hour.

I just read the new Wrox book, Professional DotNetNuke ASP.NET Portals, I liked it and it is more detailed but I think this books conveys the concepts in a much more compact and understandable manner

Summary: Invaluable
If you have a need to add custom modules and don't want to spend hours reviewing the modules already in place, then this book will help you!

Summary: Clear and Comprehensive
This is the second book that I have read on DotNetNuke and I found this one the better of the two. It is comprehensive and well written. I would definitely suggest this one over the one published by Wrox.

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ASP.NET 2.0 : A Developer's Notebook

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: Wei-Meng Lee

ISBN: 0596008120
List Price: $29.95
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 3
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Summary: Good tutorials and content, but it's all in VB.Net only
I was excited to get my hands on this book and check out the tutorials until I realized that they are all in VB.Net. No C# examples are to be found anywhere in the book. Although C# developers can typically translate code from VB into C#, it's easier and less time consuming to see the code in C# from the outset of the project. I'm really surprised that this author would aim this title at VB developers given that so much of professional development is done in C#.

Lee does, however, offer some quite useful sample projects in this book. I like how she emphasizes what's new in 2.0 instead of rehashing what .Net 1.1 developers will already know from their work. Most of the examples are short and contain just enough code to get the key concepts across to the reader. In some chapters I felt that more explanatory text would have been helpful, but with all the help documentation for .Net I was able to fill in any knowledge gaps.

Summary: Shotgun writing style didn't work for me
If I had to sum this book up in one word, it would be 'scatterbrained' ...

I have referenced it a few times; most of those times I have found the topic I was looking for but the examples/steps presented in the book didn't actually work or at least didn't work the way I needed them to.

I couldn't really find any logical flow to the book, either. It jumps from one topic to the next (maybe that is what they were striving for with the 'notebook' approach). To me, it made it difficult to use/follow. The index isn't bad, and since that was where I always went first I guess it doesn't matter too much that I was bouncing all over from chapter to chapter.

I'd say this book was of below-average usefulness. Course, there are not a lot of 'beta' books out there, so you have limited choices prior to launch.

Summary: just what the doctor ordered
just bought this book today and motoring thru it.
It is so orentated to a developer, I have been using VB since version3 and have bitten the bullet so I can do more, faster and better with net2.0
Things I liked about the book is that it is thin and its core stuff to 'just make it work'.
I can quickly be productive, build on my confidence and know where to learn more 'as and when I need it' and not get saturated with needless feature details. The book does seem to be all lab and is very suitable for those practical/kinesethic types that learn by getting their hands dirty and playing with something - it might not suit people who need to know everything before they start. Also the print style is very easy on the eyes, looks like someone has made margine notes in it and ample space for your own notes to. Wish this was the first book on ASP.NET2 I had bought.

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Programming .NET Web Services

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: Alex Ferrara Matthew MacDonald

ISBN: 0596002505
List Price: $39.95
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Summary: one of the best titles for web services developers
This text addresses just about every challenge a web-services developer may face. Whether it involves calling a set of services asynchronously (and somehow keeping the client(s) updated of its progress) - or whether it is monitoring, profiling and logging your web-services - this text contains well explained examples of doing a lot of useful stuff.
It has saved me a lot of time - and I found it well worth the price.

Summary: Understand web services in a .NET environment
Web Services are a catchphrase that many Microsoft-centric developers are falling in love with and they don't know why. Hey, the affair isn't limited to Microsoft based development firms. Web Services are hot topics right now. They provide the best way yet to utilize the Internet for remote work.

For the uninitiated (and aren't we all at one time or another), web services are programs that rely on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to expose their interfaces across the Internet. This means you can write a program and, if you make it a web service, you will expose its public interfaces for anyone to use via the Internet.

This book takes a normal O'Reilly tack of presenting in-depth information that is appropriate for users who want to know the wherefores behind the decisions. The authors present the Microsoft/Visual Studio methodology where many of the tedious tasks of Web Service development are performed for the user. They also do a solid job of presenting why that work must be done by someone and how to do it if you don't want to use Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). The book gives good information (about 30 pages) covering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) before it covers the incredible facility VS.NET provides for generating these documents. WSDL docs are necessary for every web service you build if you expect anyone to use your program. The authors explain and lead the reader through the process of writing a web service and consuming a web service. They also expend effort on discussing stateful versus non-stateful web services and how to appropriately choose the best methodology for your application. With the performance gains that can be attained in IIS 6 via caching, the assertion the authors make about considering caching during design phase rather than after development is in testing or production struck a chord. The book covers IIS 6's caching choices as well as explaining the benefits and drawbacks of both. I didn't finish the debugging and security sections but plan to get back into the book and finish them as they look valuable.

In conclusion, if you want to mine a book for a robust understanding of web services and the constituent pieces of that technology (with all your examples in C#) then this book is for you. If you're looking to get a 5 minute read and start throwing code (and probably exceptions), pick up a less thorough book. You'll actually read this one instead of just looking for examples to copy. The information this book imparts should be standard knowledge for anyone that expects to write production quality web services.

Summary: VERY GOOD .NET WEB COVERAGE
"Programming .NET Web Services" is an easy-to-understand text, which simplified all the difficult aspects of XML Web Services (as it concerned Microsoft .NET platform).
At 500 pages, this book is not that voluminous, yet, it detailed most of the essential issues needed in order to utilize all the .NET options which one is likely to encounter on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft clients.
I really find this book useful, despite the fact that some of its elaborations are not as extensive as I would like them to be. This textbook is better used as a daily text, or as the case may be, a quick reference resource.

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Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: VB Edition

Publisher: Mike Murach & Associates
Authors: Anne Boehm Joel Murach

ISBN: 1890774367
List Price: $39.50
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Summary: Another Hit for the Murach series...
I had limited experience with ASP.Net 1.0 (most of which I did after reading the Murach books on VB.Net and ASP.Net), but I found this new book easy to read and valuable. As usual, the explanations are clear and the examples are useful.

Like all the other Murach books I've used, this one is layed out in that most sensible way - a byte-size explanation of a topic on the left-hand page, then a code sample on the facing right-hand page. It's a beautiful system, and it works as well with this new ASP.Net 2.0 book as it has with their previous volumes.

Also like other Murach books, this one is well-distilled - this is not one of those 1000-page doorstops - at just over 500 pages, every page is useful, but I don't feel anything important was left out.

The proof of the pudding is that I was quickly able to understand the significant changes from ASP.Net version 1.0/1.1 to 2.0 quickly and have started to incorporate what I've learned into my development.

Highly recommended, and a bargain, too.

Summary: A thorough resource written especially for professional programmers
Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide, VB Edition is a thorough resource written especially for professional programmers. Chapters explain in depth how to get the most out of all of the new features in ASP.NET 2.0, and how to seamlessly upgrade from ASP.NET 1.x. Examples, sample code, step-by-step walkthroughs of new procedures, and exhaustive information concerning ASP.NET 2.0 data access and practical solutions to common problems fill this compendium. Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide presumes some familiarity with computer programming in general and ASP.NET in particular, and is therefore especially recommended for programmers of intermediate to advanced knowledge and skill, who are looking to painlessly make the transition to ASP.NET 2.0.

Summary: Not for Beginners, but Invaluable for the Experienced
Be sure to note the title. If you're looking for a book on how to do ASP.NET pages, you might want to consider some other title first. This book is about upgrading to the new ASP.NET 2.0 edition. It presumes that you have enough experience with ASP.NET that you want to learn what's new and different, not how to start from the beginning. You might also want to have some experience in using earlier versions of Visual Studio as this book concentrates on using Visual Studio 2005 as the development environment. Of course the basic use of ASP in any of its varieties is to connect to a database, and to do this you need some experience with programming in SQL, the language of databases (SQL is a very powerful language of its own.). Finally, this book is the Visual Basic edition, there's also a C# Edition from Murach if that is your programming language of choice.

Wow! that sounds like you need a lot of background to start reading this book. Yes, I think that's true. Microsoft's ASP has grown from a very simple way to connect HTML pages to a database (when Microsoft first bought the package) to quite a powerful system capable of not only database connectivity but the full power of complete programming languages.

But if you are already doing your web site in the earlier version of the software, this book will enable you to take advantage of the new features in 2.0 quicker and easier than any other book I've seen. Note however, that this is a pretty good sized book in its own right. There a lot that's new in 2.0, this book doesn't just list what's new it explains the new features, illustrates why you might want to use them, and show you how to program the new features.

Using this book is a lot easier than trying to pull this information from a manual on the software.

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Visual Basic 2005 : A Developer's Notebook (Developer's Notebook)

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Authors: Matthew MacDonald

ISBN: 0596007264
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Summary: Great Book, but...
Matthew MacDonald's Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook is a wonderful read. No doubt about it. But there are two things which he claims that Visual Studio 2005 intorduces was already in Visual Studio 2003. For example: The Intellisense when you try to use the Try..Catch..End Try block. The intellisense for pulling up only classes of type System.Exception is already there in VS2003.

But altogether its a great book for getting in touch with VB.NET 2005.

Summary: Learn new language features, deploy smart client networks, and use new forms controls in a workbook packed with examples
Time-saving tips for software developers and Visual Basic users also reside in Matthew MacDonald's Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook productivity is the emphasis here, with tips on restoring the missing features such as compile-and-run which were active in the previous version of Visual Basic. Learn new language features, deploy smart client networks, and use new forms controls in a workbook packed with examples.

Summary: Great book for advanced VB.NET
Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook
by Matthew MacDonald
Published by O'Reilly Press
ISBN 0-596-00726-4

Reviewed by Andre Beier / Huntug member

This is a great book for the advanced VB.Net programmer who does not have the time to explore every single detail about the changes/improvements of the new release of VB.NET but rather needs to get a quick overview of what's coming up.

The book is divided into the following chapters:

*Visual Studio

*The Visual Basic Language

*Windows Applications

*Web Applications

*Files, Databases, and XML

*.NET 2.0 Platform Services

Each chapter has several sections that give a brief explanation of a new feature and a hands-on lab. The book is easy and fun to read.

Even though the title of the book is VB.NET 2005, it also has a chapter about Windows Applications and one about Web Applications. If you are only developing Web Apps, parts of the book might not be that interesting for you (maybe ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook by Wei-Meng Lee, Published by O'Reilly Press, ISBN 0596008120 might be a better pick).

I would give it a perfect rating if there were not a couple of errors in the source code (I tried the labs with Visual Studio.Net 2005 Beta 2). One can argue whether it is the authors fault or not, since the final version of the .NET 2.0 framework has not been released yet and changes are quite possible, however, if you have to spend time trouble shooting the source code, what is the point in having a book that gives you a quick dive into a new technology? Therefore I can only give it 4 out of 5 stars.

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