| Learning Visual Basic .NET | |||
| by Jesse Liberty (October, 2002 - List Price: $34.95) | |||
Jesse Liberty writes like he's an old friend explaining the best way to change the oil in your car - just someone who wants things to go right for you. That makes him the ideal author of a book to introduce beginning programmers to the complexities of something like VB.NET. At the same time, he simplifies things his own way ... |
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According to Jesse, the three characteristics of object oriented programming are encapsulation, polymorphism, and specialization. Specialization? Jesse doesn't even hint that most people call this inheritance until many chapters later (when he explains why). He insists on referring to the Visual Studio windows as MDI (Multiple Document Interface) windows when it's easy to discover for yourself that the child windows are not at all like VB 6 MDI windows. He's very consistent in using the term access modifier instead of the more common scope to describe keywords like Public and Private. But then, Microsoft uses both terms which is probably an example of why their documentation is a lot harder to read and understand. The genius of Jesse's books is that he has a sixth sense about what you want to see and know about. The most frustrating thing about technical books is that you so often run into little things that make you ask, "Why is that there?" This is the most frustration-free book you are likely to find. Here's an example: Other programming books might have an explanation of shared and unshared methods. Only Jesse remembers that he has not discussed it yet and reassures you that you will get an explanation so you don't go flipping back through the book to see what you missed. (Note ... Jesse himself asked for the wording change from reference in the current edition to parameter in reviewing this article.) One thing that some readers may miss about this book is an extended coverage of Windows programming ... especially since many VB 6 programmers simply assume that VB and Windows are basically the same thing. Jesse doesn't write about Windows until the very last chapter and then he only mentions it. The idea here is that VB.NET is a completely new concept and that needs to be learned first. It's an idea that a lot of real VB.NET gurus agree on. For example, in his advanced book about VB.NET, Andrew Troelsen uses twice as many pages before mentioning Windows. Of all the books that have been reviewed for our Guide to the VB.NET books, this was one of the most readable. I was able to go through it cover to cover like a novel, but it still delivered the goods for me! One element of a great technical book that is still missing is downloadable source code. Although the book says you can download source code, it's not quite there yet. Jesse assured About Visual Basic that this problem would be corrected real soon now!
The extremely prolific (dozens of books over the years) technical author and consultant Jesse Liberty appears to be working for O'Reilly now since his most recent five books are under that imprint. It's interesting to note that his earlier books were mostly about C and C++ but his more recent books are all .NET related. A product of the corporate technology circus at AT&T and CitiBank, Jesse is now in business for himself. |
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