The Impressive Wiley Books Lineup!

Last November came and went without as many great books on Visual Basic as I expected to see ...

... given the major upgrade that Visual Basic received when Framework 2.0 was announced.

My own theory is that publishers and writers were waiting to be sure they knew exactly what Microsoft was going to ship. (In other words, they were lacking in trust. My Golly! If you can't trust MICROSOFT, who can you trust!)

Another reason, however is that something as huge as the .NET Framework - and all the associated products - just takes some serious time and effort to get your head around. Microsoft has thousands of techies to create this stuff. There are a lot fewer writers to work on explaining it and many of the best of them have day jobs too.

You might be protesting that Microsoft Press had books on day 1 of announcement. True. The 2005 version of the popular "Step By Step" Visual Basic book was published a month early in October, for example. But, to use an analogy with cars, Microsoft Press books are sorta like the famous quote from auto pioneer Henry Ford, "You can get any color you want as long as you like black." Microsoft Press books, although good, all have a very similar style. And they tend follow the "Microsoft" point of view pretty strictly.

I'm happy to see that some great books are out on the market now, however.

I recently got a chance to examine the lineup produced so far by Wiley. You probably know them better by their various brands: Wrox, Sybex, Wiley Technical, and the extremely popular "Dummies" series. Going back to the "car" analogy, if Wiley was a car company, it would be GM. (Well ... except for the financial problems.) By that, I mean that their different brands give you a real choice. To give Wiley credit, they seem to allow their subsidiaries the freedom to develop their own style and voice.

I'm planning on adding full reviews of all of these books later on, but I wanted to provide a preview now of the Wiley line.

The "Cadillac" brand of the Wiley books is Wrox. Those of us who have admired Wrox over the years really worried when their owner, Peer Information, went bust in 2003. For a while, it looked like we would never see those smiling, nerdy faces on their distinctive red covers again. But Wiley picked up the pieces and they're back in business almost like nothing happened.

I like to follow technical publishing like some people memorize baseball statistics so I was interested to learn that the great technical publisher Apress picked up more of the former Wrox titles and more of the experienced Wrox staff than Wiley did. If you have one of the books that Wrox published before the big crash, you might find the Wrox support files, like errata and source code downloads, at Apress now.

Check this link at Apress to look for one of the former Wrox books.

We should look for even more great things from Apress in the future!

Along with the Wrox brand, Wiley was smart enough to keep the Wrox approach to technical publishing. As they work to build up the brand again, they already have a complete top to bottom selection no matter where you are in using Visual Basic. About Visual Basic has already done a complete review of the book at the very top, Roger Jennings' Visual Basic 2005 Database Programming. This book received my first five star rating for the current crop of VB.NET 2005 books! But to get you started in database programming, Wrox has also published Beginning Visual Basic 2005 Databases (ISBN 0-7645-8894-X). For pure VB, Wrox has Beginning Visual Basic 2005 (ISBN 0-7645-7401-9) and Professional VB 2005 (ISBN 0-7645-7536-8). Finally, Wrox has given us one that everybody can use, Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (ISBN 0-7645-7198-2).

But there's more to the Wiley publishing lineup!

The Sybex "Mastering" series has a tradition that is as long and distinguised as Wrox. For their main VB.NET 2005 book, they have turned to Evangelos Petroutsos, an author who started writing books about Visual Basic back in the ActiveX and COM days and who has several "Mastering" titles under his by-line now. Mastering Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 (ISBN 0-7821-4349-0) is a book you can trust to bring you the quality and completeness that the series has become famous for.

The Wiley Technology Publishing group typically has books that cover more specialized parts of the programming puzzle. One of their latest books, Visual Basic Design Patterns (ISBN 0-471-26860-7) isn't specifically a VB.NET 2005 book. Instead, it covers the fascinating, and relatively recent study of "design patterns" from a Visual Basic .NET perspective. (It was originally going to be titled, "Visual Basic .NET Design Patterns"!)

Here's their definition of design patterns: "Software patterns are reusable solutions to recurring problems you encounter during software development." They're like a little like objects, then. You can take advantage of the work of previous programmers in figuring out how to do things right.

Speaking of design patterns, they must have used one to pick the authors of the book. It's a team effort between a Microsoft "insider" (Brad Merrill, an engineer on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft) and an "outsider" (Mark Grand, consultant, educator, author and, of course, programmer). This kind of combination has a history of creating excellent books.

For future programmers just starting out (who also have a sense of humor about it), Wiley provides a "Dummies" book, Visual Basic 2005 For Dummies (ISBN 076457728X).

I feel a need to make my standard disclaimer about this:

I hate the title of this series. I'm not a "dummy" and I don't think you are either. I would never call someone a dummy, especially in a book title. But on the other hand, the series has been hugely popular so they must be doing something right.

One thing they're doing right is combining real expertise from author Bill Sempf with a price that is as low as you'll find anywhere. Now that's a powerful combination!

Keep checking for in-depth reviews of all of these books right here at About Visual Basic!