This book is not strictly VB.NET … it's VB.NET plus C# and VB 6. And it's one of the few books here that might be considered a pure reference book. You have to give Bischof credit. He sticks pretty close to his purpose of providing a book for people who are, for some reason, stuck with trying to be productive where more than one of these languages is in use. This is a book for the working programmer who is constantly muttering, "I know I could do that in VB 6! How do you do it in .NET?"

One very good thing about it is that it is also a fair recipe book of solutions - in three languages, of course. You want an example program for creating a log file? Here you go. How about sequential file I/O? Gotcha covered. With downloadable source code!

No review of this book would be complete without mentioning that the co-founder of APress, Dan Appleman, wrote a similar eBook, Visual Basic .NET or C# … Which to Choose. You can get an Acrobat PDF of the book for less than $10 and it complements this one very nicely.

Applications: ADO.NET

About the Author

In their drive to become a major technology book publisher, APress discovered Brian Bischof running his own training and consulting company in California. This book must be successful; Brian is writing another one for APress that will be published soon - Crystal Reports and Visual Studio .NET.