You're a red hot code worker and you don't have time to plow through a thousand pages to figure out VB.NET. You already know the syntax and you're smart enough to have figured out that the main thing that stops you from moving up to .NET is the total object-oriented makeover of VB.NET that makes it about as much like VB 6 as a Mack truck is like a Volkswagen. You need the fast-lane to VB.NET objects and you need it now.

Hamilton wrote your book!

He's absolutely right about the bedrock requirement for understanding VB.NET's object orientation. If you can stand the heat in his kitchen, the cooking is fine.

At the same time, Hamilton's vision is his own and it's wise to understand that if you decide to devote your time and dollars to his book. He recommends reading it "from cover to cover" and that's good advice since it's an invitation to go along with him through his personal journey to OOP. For example, in defining OOP in the first chapter, he states that it rests on four foundational concepts:

• Abstraction
• Encapsulation
• Inheritance
• Polymorphism

Other authorities often insist that there are really three (see the About Visual Basic technical glossary for example) and leave out Abstraction. Hamilton himself admits that "Encapsulation is ... frequently confused with Abstraction." Count me among the confused. It seems to me that the other three are more measurable qualifications. Either a language can encapsulate objects or not. Either a language supports inheritance or it doesn't (VB 6 didn't). Abstraction seems to me to be the measuring tape used to determine whether encapsulation has been implemented or not ... and kind of a stretchy tape at that. You ask the question, "Is the interface an abstract interface or does it depend on the internal programming of the object in some way?" It's possible for honest people to disagree about that. But abstraction is a useful concept to discuss the issue.

This kind of issue defines the good and the, well ..., unique about Hamilton's book. You learn a lot when you read it, but you need to be aware that you're reading an expert point of view, not a reference manual.

About the Author

J.P. Hamilton lives like a man on a mission as well as writing like one. One of his hobbies is sky diving and his next goal is to climb Mount Everest. It's probably not necessary to tell you that he's from Texas. He's written one other book for O'Reilly before this: Visual Basic Shell Programming. He started learning programming with Basic in 1982 and after working with a C/Pascal derivative, he settled back to VB in 1995.