Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2010 in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours) 1st Edition

I had read on several sites that this was a good book to start with. I am very well versed with how to use a computer... like many people in the 21st century, so I found much of the commentary unnecessary. The writing could be interpreted by an old-timer who doesn't even know how to type, that's how simplistic it is.A concept that could have been covered earlier on for more clarity are namespaces and how to call the right function for the job you want. The book provides a small table showing you the different paths for method and function calls on the last few pages, which would have made many of the concepts much more clearer if it were at the beginning.A funny thing is that the other Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2010 in 24 Hours actually does just though, explaining the language, the .NET framework, and the class library I mentioned above in the first few pages. The Sams books were written by different authors, so that could be a major reason why. Notably, after reading through the Sams C# book, I found that all the gaps that were missing were covered in that book. If you're set on Sams, teach yourself the C# first and go for another Visual Basic book to have a good base for both languages.The beginning chapters were very long. Much of it as the prior reviews said were exactly "step by step" with nothing left out. This is fine if you need an insane amount of direction but if you're fine on a computer than it is unnecessary. What was frustrating is that the first half of the book was written like this. It described how to use the IDE which is basically just clicking buttons and using the Visual Studio program to build a user interface. Everything in the first half of the book can be accomplished by a reasonable person who just hovers over all the buttons in Visual Studio and reads the tooltips for an hour. There. I just saved you 11 hours.After he explains how to click buttons that tell you exactly what it does in the program with tooltips, he gets to the real grind about the underlying programming. Unfortunately in most of the sections the key points that we need to know to make that information useful he tells us can't be covered in this book and we will need to get a more advanced book to learn it. I already know the concepts, because I know how to ask google for the basics on a topic. Therefore the majority of the last 12 hours was also useless. Specifically, in the section "Designing Objects with Classes" he talks about the concept of making objects and instantiating them from a class, but never goes deeper than the concept, therefore the info can't be used by the reader. For myself, I already knew this and that's why I bought the book, to learn this stuff.I purchased the Wrox book Visual Basic 2010 Programmers Reference by Rod Stephens and it is muchhhhh better. Not only is it still affordable, but it starts from the bare bone basics and covers all that necessary material past the concepts that this book failed to provide. (In other words it's the book that the author told us we would have to go by to get more details.)

First off, I am a complete beginner with no programming training or experience. I've been wanting to learn for quite a while though and started looking around for ways to learn on my own at home. I purchased this book based on the reviews and have been quite happy. I'm half way through the book and have found the concepts easily delivered and explained. I move slower on some things but still am able to grasp them once I go over them a few times and use the materials provided with this book.Pros: Easy to follow. Learning projects are not complicated and easy to understand what part is doing what. I especially like that the author moved away from the "hello world" intro and moved into something just as simple to understand with the picture viewer. Code is explained well and the author uses analogies well to convey what is happening within the code.Cons: None for me so far but of course this is very subjective. This method of instruction works well for me.Tips: I had a project for work in mind that I wanted to be able to implement; this helped me identify with what language to start learning. Visual Basic ended up being a great place to start. Self paced learning works best when you set yourself up to succeed with it by making sure you follow along with the book, even if you feel you already understand a concept, don't skip it.... it helps to reinforce past things and introduce you to future lessons. Some "hours" I have reread a few times before moving on.... if you find yourself not understanding something, read it again and do the examples again until you do. I use other free sites and instruction to get a better understanding on a concept. So whatever you do.... don't move on until you understand what you are currently reading.

Producing a beginners programming book is always an "iffy" proposition. For a true beginner, probably no book can work - too many gaps to be filled in with explanation. For the more experienced, but new to this programming paradigm, such a book could at times be too simplistic with many questions going unanswered.The author in this case has managed to strike a happy medium. Basically this book is intended for one to get one's feet wet in the VB 2010 environment, while learning the rudiments of useful aspects of VB as it relates to constructing user interfaces and accessing files and the registry. It is well written, proceeding in a step-by-step fashion. For the total novice, going through the steps may not be all that helpful.I had to get nearly to the end of the book in HOUR 21 to find a mistake where the author mixed up "previous" and "next" controls in a database example. But there is some glaring lack of information. For example, the author does not attempt to explain the various files in a VB project and how they should be found in a file structure. That is pretty basic information that detracts from the book for the more knowledgeable.One cannot truly "understand" VB 2010 from this book. VB was first designed because of its ease of use, but under the covers, VB .Net is extremely complicated. Just the class structures alone are bewildering. The trick is can one take a book like this, which really is quite simple, and ramp one's self up to a point where the full power of VB can be used.It should also be noted that if one really works through all of the examples from scratch, most of the chapters take a few hours, give or take - definitely not one hour. All in all it is a worthwhile book with the noted caveats.

I have used various products for programming over many years - but am not a computer programmer. It is some time since I looked at programming in 'Windows' and have memories of VB6 and VBA.This book provided a good coverage of topics that should enable most people to have their first project up and running with. For my next project I wanted to create some fixed drawings from code (select outlines of boxes or cylinders type stuff) - there is quite sufficient coverage to allow me to do that. I also want to link to (simple) but true databases ( to look material properties and record results of calculations). Again sufficient information to allow me to do that is in this book.What I really appreciate is the understanding of how .NET is organised. How to get at those things I have vague recollection about (particularly file IO). The 'new' error handling structure (try, catch & finally) has been helpful.Much if the if..then..else; do..while etc I was familiar with, along with events.So for me this book has been worth the money, and no doubt I will use it for reference until my fluency is regained.

It's a decent book for getting started, i did study VB many years ago but a bits changed since then so i broguht this book just to jump back in to the new version.My primary area for re-learning was saving data and this book covers ADO.net for saving in a database but you need to create the database in Access which was no good to me since i don't have Microsoft Office Professional £370. Or MS Access £90I wanted to use the database features included in VB but they don't seem to work using the method the book shows (I might be doing something wrong there but)I have other tutorials online which have helped me through my troubles.This book is a great source though for getting into VB, the DVD comes with an official copy of Visual basic express and as mentioned by others it would be better if the project codes came on a CD however you can register to the website and type the code provided and you can download a zip file with everything in.

A very fine book, written by an author with indepth subject knowledge. No errors have been detected. Perhaps just one comment, it would have been very helpful if the companion code had been included on the enclosed DVD.

This book is really useful for anyone needing to increase their knowledge of Visual Basic.

Nicely laid out, sensible size chapters on each topic. Good clear explanations and plenty of examples. A very good introduction to the subject.