Visual Basic 2005 - A Developer's Notebook - Book Review

Matthew MacDonald

April, 2005
ISBN: 0596007264

The Statistics Tell The Story ...

These statistics tell you a lot of what you need to know about MacDonalds new book:

The downloadable example code (all of it explained in the book) is --

• Almost 9 MB! (My first hard drive was only ten meg!)
• 46 Projects
• Six major sections keyed to the six parts of the book.
• 74 Different topics

A Developer's Experience

This is the kind of book that gets comments like, "I was able to solve this programming problem I've been working on for months right after I bought it!" Finding answers here is like finding hidden treasure. I had a great example of that kind of experience the first time I picked it up.

One of the first sections tells you about debugger datatips. Since I've been using Visual Studio 2005 for a while now (You downloaded the beta version too, didn't you?), I knew that the tooltip explanations of variables and objects that you see when you rest the mouse on something in the code had been improved a lot. But I didn't know exactly how much it had been improved. In a two page example (including the code), the book opened my eyes to what the new improvements in Visual Studio 2005 really meant. The key was the example code. It used objects that made it perfectly clear to see what the datatip display was telling me. More ... it told me what to look for at Microsoft's MSDN site to create my own custom datatips.

Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

What The Book Is Not

The main thing that some will object to in the Developer's Notebook is that it's a little like a book-length version of MSDN Magazine or Visual Studio Magazine. That is, it's just a series of great articles about programming. But I think a lot of programmers will like to just sit down with it and learn something new -- Seventy Four Times!

The articles are organized and well written ... and they're all about Visual Basic 2005, but this book doesn't even pretend to "cover" Visual Basic. So don't buy this one if you need to learn the language from the ground up. There is more left out than there is in.

What is "in" is pretty impressive, however, especially for a book that is not too expensive. The six sections are:

1. Visual Studio
2. The Visual Basic Language
3. Windows Applications
4. Web Applications
5. Files, Databases, and XML
6. .NET 2.0 Platform Services

And the list price is only about $30. You can buy it at discount for about $20. By comparison, the single copy price of Visual Studio Magazine is $6, so you could buy five issues for the list price of this book. Each issue will have six or eight articles and, if you're lucky, a maximum of two will focus on Visual Basic 2005. If your goal is to understand Visual Studio 2005, the book is a much better buy -- probably about five times better. And it won't fall over on your bookshelf.

I have to say that I like the Developer's Notebook format too. The pages have a graph paper print that I find makes the text easier to read. And the "marginal notes" in a freehand script font are really well done with helpful information.

You're getting the benefit of an experienced hand with this book. Matthew MacDonald's name is on around thirty software books so far, all on Microsoft technologies and many on Visual Basic. In this business, experience usually pays off for customers.

I'm giving this one a high rating because it completely fulfills the advertised claims at a low price. It has real value for your money.