Sometimes, the recipes are the "light" version
The chapter on math contains a quick program to swap two numbers in memory using the exclusive OR operation (Xor). This might be a more typical example of one of the recipes.
This program is the sort of code that assembly programmers used to use all the time. But it's seldom done today because, as the authors state, "efforts to save the space of a single variable in memory seem kind of silly." I also agree with the authors that, "it demonstrates bit manipulation functions." Again, once the decision is made to allocate some space in the book for something like this, it should be followed up with some discussion about why it works so the reader can actually learn about bit manipulation. A truth table for Xor might have been nice, for example. Or even the use of the phrase "exclusive OR" instead of just the keyword name "Xor".
The Authors - Tim Patrick and John Clark Craig
The authors, Tim Patrick and John Clark Craig, are veterans of the technical book biz, but they offer an unusual mix. Tim Patrick is a veteran of the Redmond software industry and his previous book was one of the famed O'Reilly "Nutshell" books, "Visual Basic 2005 in a Nutshell," where he joined the established, and very technical, O'Reilly team of Paul Lomax, Ron Petrusha, and Steven Roman. Just being invited to join a team like that is a badge of honor. John Clark Craig is also described on the book cover as the author of "more than a dozen books on Visual Basic." And in fact, Craig has written about almost every version from QuickBasic for DOS right up to VB 6.0 although this is his first for VB.NET. As someone who also has "deep experience" on his resume, I can appreciate what this brings to the table.
