| Pro VB 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Platform |
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Author: Andrew Troelsen & Vidya Vrat Agarwal Updating existing books to the latest version tends to make them ever larger. Is this a problem in this case?
Author: Andrew Troelsen & Vidya Vrat Agarwal This is an obscenely large book! It's an update to Andrew Troelsen's earlier book on VB 2008 and the revision has simply made it bigger. There is no way any reasonable reader sits down and reads this book cover to cover - it would be like reading an encyclopedia from A to Z. 
The good news is that it is reasonably well organized. Chapters 1 through 9 forms a basic introduction to object oriented programming with VB 2010: 1 Introducing VB 2010 2 Building Visual Basic 2010 Applications 3 Core VB 2010 Programming Constructs, Part I 4 Core VB 2010 Programming Constructs, Part II 5 Defining Encapsulated Class Types 6 Understanding Inheritance and Polymorphism 7 Understanding Structured Exception Handling 8 Understanding Object Lifetime 9 Working with Interfaces Then we have a few chapters on advanced features of the language: 10 Understanding Generics 11 Delegates, Events, and Lambdas 12 Advanced VB 2010 Language Features 13 LINQ to Objects Then the book focuses on what you might call technical details of how .NET and Visual Basic interact: 14 Configuring .NET Assemblies 15 Type Reflection, Late Binding, and Attribute-Based Programming 16 Processes, AppDomains, and Object Contexts 17 Understanding CIL and the Role of Dynamic Assemblies 18 Dynamic Types and the Dynamic Language Runtime 19 Multithreaded and Parallel Programming The next big topic is data starting out with simple file I/O but then concentrating on ADO.NET with a rounding off of XML and LINQ: 20 File I/O and Object Serialization 21 ADO.NET Part I: The Connected Layer 22 ADO.NET Part II: The Disconnected Layer 23 ADO.NET Part III: The Entity Framework 24 Introducing LINQ to XML Next we work our way though the main .NET APIs including a major section on WPF: 25 Introducing Windows Communication Foundation 26 Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 27 Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML 28 Programming with WPF Controls 29 WPF Graphics Rendering Services 30 WPF Resources, Animations, and Styles 31 WPF Control Templates and UserControls Finally we have an almost self contained book within a book on ASP.NET: 32 Building ASP.NET Web Pages 33 ASP.NET Web Controls, Master Pages, and Themes 34 ASP.NET State Management Techniques The book then closes with two major appendices which might as well be regarded as chapters: A Programming with Windows Forms B Platform-Independent .NET Development with Mono Notice that programming with Windows Forms is considered so last year that it isn't in the main body of the book. The appendix on Mono is actually a very far account of a topic that tends to frighten mainstream .NET programmers and well worth reading. What can one say of the rest of the book? The first thing to say is that it would be entirely possible to split this huge volume into a number of more focused books. It ia also true that the depth of coverage varies from just stating what the facility is and how it works to reasonably long explanations and justifications. Overall thought the coverage is good. In most cases it wont solve difficult problems for you or take you into creative ways of using a facility but it will tell you the basics with a reasonable amount of explanation. And yes despite my complaining about the size of the book - just over 1700 pages - I have found it useful to have around and it will continue to warp my bookshelf and give me arm ache in the future. If you need an encyclopedia on VB .NET and .NET 4. this is a good choice - and if you don't want arm-ache it is available in a Kindle edition.
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 11 April 2011 ) |