Ever notice how really great things often come in three's? The Three Kings, Newton's Three Laws of Motion, The Three Musketeers (even though there were four of them). The Power of Three strikes again with ...
- Beginning Visual Basic .NET
- ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET
- VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET
Introducing Mike Murach & Associates
This matched set of hefty volumes are a veritable triumvirate of VB.NET Books that, taken together, cover just about everything you need to learn and use VB.NET.
The books come from Mike Murach & Associates, a small publisher of high quality programming books that has actually been in business for just over thirty years, a real accomplishment in that business. Murach's business philosophy is more to invest in creating a book that can be sold for years to schools and training centers as well as individuals. At almost 700 pages each, these are serious learning and reference tools.
To really understand what you're getting, you need to know a little bit about the way Murach produces books.
Murach's Different Ideas for Programming Books
First, Murach employs writers to create their books rather than contracting with free-lancers. These books are written by the team of Anne Prince and Doug Lowe. Their association with Murach goes back to the mid 1980's and they each have author credentials for over twenty books starting with mainframe Cobol and OS books. Doug Lowe also has quite a string of the low-end "For Dummies" titles to his credit. Murach says that this gives them the ability to create uniform, quality controlled results with guaranteed value. Murach might never publish a blockbuster hit like Appleman's legendary "Programmers Guide to the Win32 API" or Pezold's "Programming Windows", but every book you do get from them will have the content and quality that you expect.
Second, Murach books have a distinctive internal organization and content that is designed in from the start. They've been creating books this way for years and they're getting pretty good at it. One of the first things you will notice is what Murach calls "paired pages". From start to finish, the left hand page contains the text and the right hand page shows you syntax, examples, and guidelines for the left-hand text. It's a unique approach and it really works!
How the Murach Difference Works
If you browse through the Table of Contents, you might notice that about half of the chapters of every book start with the words, "How to ..." and that's the basic philosophy throughout. They aim to tell you how to do things. The "paired page" approach supports this goal exceptionally well. If you're interested in knowing (again) "how to" do some programming task, you may read all or part of the left-hand page for a topic and then skip over to the right-hand page where you'll probably see the code to do what you need.
For example, I was interested in the BinaryReader class in VB.NET. So I checked the "About BinaryReader Class" topic in VB.NET's online Help. The total explanation there was, "Reads primitive data types as binary values in a specific encoding." That was it - the whole explanation! In "Beginning Visual Basic .NET", however, page 414 (left-hand) tells you "how to" use the class and page 415 (right-hand) gives you a table of the important methods in the class, some sample code for the class, and a summarized class description.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Pretty good for a "beginning" book!
Beginning Visual Basic .NET - The foundation
Another important part of the books is the code base available with them. They make a point of developing applications as part of the designed structure of the books. This makes it as useful to read them from start to finish, as part of a class or a self-study approach, as they are as reference and problem solving books. The download for "Beginning Visual Basic .NET" contains 18 complete applications and over ten meg of code.
The foundation of the series is "Beginning Visual Basic .NET" but don't mistake this for a book that shows you "Hello World" and not much more. You get the basics of ADO.NET, ASP.NET as well as key topics like XML and bound controls. In fact, the only criticism of the three together is that there is some overlap since all of them have at least an introduction to the topics in the other two. So if your budget is limited and your needs are specific, buy the one that is closest to what you're doing and you'll get enough to do the job.
