It's funny how perspectives from a programmer and a beginner differ so greatly on this text. I am a very successful 30 something student at a major university. I think I am qualified to say, from a beginner's standpoint, that this book leaves much to be desired. I will retread some of the same points others have made here.

The book is intentionally vague: As beginners, students need to grasp basic programming concepys and styles. This text seems to often avoid explaining these basic concepts. The text also does not offer examples of good efficient code or practices. The teacher materials (assignments) intentionally ask for things not discussed in the chapters, The exams are designed to trick the student rather than test understanding of concepts. Forcing sheer memorization over understanding is a bad way to start learning. Example: Which of the following are properties of the Color Structure? a. R,G,B / b. ColorRed,ColorBlue,ColorRed / c. Alpha / d. All of the above - if you answered A you are correct -but Alpha is also a property of the color structure. That's not inportant. A is the answer.

Examples sometimes don't work: Code examples in Chapter 6 fail to work. What's worse, the publisher's web site does not correct this issue. If you plan on drawing text onto a form prepare to do some reading on the outside in order to accomplish this task.

Not easy to read: As mentioned, this text is full of run on sentenses, disjointed and technical. Technical is good, but some plain english explanations would help the BEGINNER to grasp concepts.

Class revolt over the text: As mentioned, students in my class have openly criticized this text. (They actually begged the teacher to just code in VB and explain what's happening over usung the text) These complaints were brought to not only to the teacher, but to the head of the department.

If you are teacher and want to teach VB to beginners, look at some of the other suggestions posted here. This text makes learning VB a chore. People want to be challenged, but also have fun learning something as powerful and simple as VB.NET.

I have been using this book in concert with another book to teach a two-semester course that covers an introduction to programming logic and design and business programming to MIS students. I have to say that it is like all textbooks, it is not perfect. It could go a little deeper on the explanations of code segments and probably should include additional topics like XML processing and Web services.For these reasons it received 4 stars instead of 5. However, for those of you that have dismissed this text, both students and instructors, you entirely missed the point and utility of the text. The style of presentation is wonderful and not disjointed. Students that complain about this text are unwilling to play a little 'connect the dots' on their own and teachers that want to cater to this type of student should rethink their strategy. If you want a textbook that will hold your hand and keep you from having to think too hard, then try another book. For the faint of heart I suggest the book by Zak and practically anyone else. The Bradley and Millspaugh books were on their way to being on the same level as Ekedahl and Newman, but missed the boat.

This is one of the worst books I've used to teach a programming language course. I'm sorry I let the university talk me into using it. The book is organized around examples rather than concepts. As a result, each chapter is full of a disjointed collection of concepts -- a poor idea for an introductory programming course. In addition, many examples do not work, forcing the instructor to debug the examples. If you're looking for a good introductory book for Visual Basic .Net, I suggest "Visual Basic .Net How to Program", 2nd Ed (ISBN: 0130293636) by Dietel, Dietel, and Nieto.

I have been using this book in my VB class for 4 months in local community college. The only people who like this book are teachers! I had to read the chapters at least twice to understand what the auther is explaining. Chapter 6 is especially bad, in the chapter the auther completed half the code in the example and completely ignored to explain them. The graphic part of this book was very difficult to understand. The code example (the one that completed by author, you can download from publisher) in Chapter 6 gives wrong result when you run the solution for print out. The first several chapters were OK, but as it gets harder the author is not so kind to the students, he skips explanations even though it is a new concept. As a result we were forced to use other books, lab assistants, and so forth to complete our work. The good part is I was forced to be an independent thinker, since we cannot count on author to explan subjects. If you are using this book in the class or other environment in which some help is available to you, then this book is somewhat acceptable. Just do not use this book if you are thinking to learn VB on your own. I know that most of the programming books are not easy to read and programming students have a lot of work to do, even then this book is sub-standard.

I thought the book was very helpful. Each chapter has a tutorial that takes you step by step to learn the material. It lists out all the relevant properties of controls and lets you know what each one does. The book explains a lot and uses pictures and screen shots to help. Yes, some of it is hard to understand, but almost every programming book has an element of this as it is not an easy task to learn a new language and it's not easy to explain it well through text alone. I wish the book would have covered more ASP.NET(only one chapter) and more on crystal reports. If you are just starting out this is a GREAT book. Even if you don't totally understand what the author is saying, you can still easily follow the tutorial step by step and will pick it up. I think books that uses tutorials are much easier to work with. If your confused there's always an easy to learn example.