Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2010 in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours)

I purchased the Kindle edition of this book and used it on my laptop next to the monitor on my desktop machine. But I am pretty sure that it will be easy to use on the same machine you are using to train with. I found that this works very well for computer training books. It actually works better than on my Kindle for training. Don't even bother to try it for a phone, there is not enough real estate on the screen. This book is very similar to the C# version of nearly the same title. It isn't going to get you very far as far as marketable skills, but it certainly will get you far enough to understand the basics, and it's not a bad platform to build on. As I haven't used VB since version 3.0, there were so many changes to learn that I needed this book. It turned out to be a very good buy, and a great price.

This book is perfect if you have no previous knowledge of programming in Visual Basic.net. I have a few books now on VB.net and have found this to be the easiest one to work through. The combination of theory and practical examples of code seem to be just about perfect for a beginner like me. I also have Visual Basic.Net by Jesse Liberty but I find this book the learning curve is to steep for me(although I am sure I will come back to this as I understand vb.net better). Whereas with James Foxalls Visual Basic.Net in 24 hrs I find I am learning at a pace that I can handle. I also like the code examples they are practical and generally fun. All in all this is a great book to start with.

Producing a beginners programming book is always an "iffy" proposition. For a true beginner, probably no book can work - too many gaps to be filled in with explanation. For the more experienced, but new to this programming paradigm, such a book could at times be too simplistic with many questions going unanswered. The author in this case has managed to strike a happy medium. Basically this book is intended for one to get one's feet wet in the VB 2010 environment, while learning the rudiments of useful aspects of VB as it relates to constructing user interfaces and accessing files and the registry. It is well written, proceeding in a step-by-step fashion. For the total novice, going through the steps may not be all that helpful. I had to get nearly to the end of the book in HOUR 21 to find a mistake where the author mixed up "previous" and "next" controls in a database example. But there is some glaring lack of information. For example, the author does not attempt to explain the various files in a VB project and how they should be found in a file structure. That is pretty basic information that detracts from the book for the more knowledgeable. One cannot truly "understand" VB 2010 from this book. VB was first designed because of its ease of use, but under the covers, VB .Net is extremely complicated. Just the class structures alone are bewildering. The trick is can one take a book like this, which really is quite simple, and ramp one's self up to a point where the full power of VB can be used. It should also be noted that if one really works through all of the examples from scratch, most of the chapters take a few hours, give or take - definitely not one hour. All in all it is a worthwhile book with the noted caveats.

I had read on several sites that this was a good book to start with. I am very well versed with how to use a computer... like many people in the 21st century, so I found much of the commentary unnecessary. The writing could be interpreted by an old-timer who doesn't even know how to type, that's how simplistic it is. A concept that could have been covered earlier on for more clarity are namespaces and how to call the right function for the job you want. The book provides a small table showing you the different paths for method and function calls on the last few pages, which would have made many of the concepts much more clearer if it were at the beginning. A funny thing is that the other Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours actually does just though, explaining the language, the .NET framework, and the class library I mentioned above in the first few pages. The Sams books were written by different authors, so that could be a major reason why. Notably, after reading through the Sams C# book, I found that all the gaps that were missing were covered in that book. If you're set on Sams, teach yourself the C# first and go for another Visual Basic book to have a good base for both languages. The beginning chapters were very long. Much of it as the prior reviews said were exactly "step by step" with nothing left out. This is fine if you need an insane amount of direction but if you're fine on a computer than it is unnecessary. What was frustrating is that the first half of the book was written like this. It described how to use the IDE which is basically just clicking buttons and using the Visual Studio program to build a user interface. Everything in the first half of the book can be accomplished by a reasonable person who just hovers over all the buttons in Visual Studio and reads the tooltips for an hour. There. I just saved you 11 hours. After he explains how to click buttons that tell you exactly what it does in the program with tooltips, he gets to the real grind about the underlying programming. Unfortunately in most of the sections the key points that we need to know to make that information useful he tells us can't be covered in this book and we will need to get a more advanced book to learn it. I already know the concepts, because I know how to ask google for the basics on a topic. Therefore the majority of the last 12 hours was also useless. Specifically, in the section "Designing Objects with Classes" he talks about the concept of making objects and instantiating them from a class, but never goes deeper than the concept, therefore the info can't be used by the reader. For myself, I already knew this and that's why I bought the book, to learn this stuff. I purchased the Wrox book Visual Basic 2010 Programmers Reference by Rod Stephens and it is muchhhhh better. Not only is it still affordable, but it starts from the bare bone basics and covers all that necessary material past the concepts that this book failed to provide. (In other words it's the book that the author told us we would have to go by to get more details.)

ok

I have only just started to read this. The layout of the book looks good. The content flows smoothly. From the little I have started on, the author has done a good job of explaining the subject, content and format quite clearly. I look forward to continuing with it. Very good value for money. It came packaged securely. Although, I did order another book separately. I would have liked them to have been packaged separately in order to be posted thru' the house letterbox. Instead of the possibility of it being sent back to the Postal Office.

I've actually gone through the book twice, still learning things. I have been thinking about buying the newer version of this book.

This book is really useful for anyone needing to increase their knowledge of Visual Basic.

This is a very BASIC teaching... I wouldn't recommend it for an in depth teaching or advance topics.