Murach's beginning Visual Basic .NET : professional training

Although this book is designed for people who are new to the .NET Framework, Visual Basic, or even programming, its goals are ambitious. In just 20 chapters, you will learn how to develop graphical user interfaces, how to develop applications that work with databases through ADO.NET, how to develop web applications that use Web services and XML, and much more. It's all there in the unique Murach style that has been training professional programmers for more than 25 years.

This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to use Visual
Basic .NET for developing business applications.

5 WAYS THE CONTENT GIVES YOU A PROFESSIONAL START

If you're a beginner, you'll learn how to code, test, and debug
object-oriented Visual Basic programs in the first seven chapters. That's
section 1 of this book, and no other book gets you started that fast with
such a wide range of skills.

In section 2, you'll learn how to develop graphical user interfaces at a
professional level. This includes the use of common controls, multi-document
interfaces, and GUI enhancements like menus, toolbars, and help information.

In section 3, you'll learn how to use the .NET classes to work with dates,
strings, arrays, collections, structures, files, and XML. You'll also learn
the skills you need for object-oriented programming. These are the
programming skills that every professional should have.

In section 4, you'll learn how to use ADO.NET and the disconnected data
architecture of the .NET platform to develop database applications with
bound controls, queries, and parameterized queries. Although there's a lot
more to database programming than that, this will get you off to a terrific
start.

In section 5, you'll learn how to develop web applications and create and
use web services. Here again, there's a lot more to web programming than
that, but this will get you started right.

4 WAYS OUR INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH INSURES YOUR SUCCESS

To help you learn how to develop applications at a professional level, this
book presents 18 business applications as examples. That way, you can see
the relationships between the Visual Basic code, objects, properties,
methods, and events that an application requires, which is essential to your
understanding. In contrast, most competing books present trivial
applications that have little resemblance to applications in the real world,
and that limits your learning potential.

To solidify your skills, the exercises at the end of each chapter guide you
through the development of some of the book's applications. They also
encourage you to experiment and challenge you to apply what you've learned
in new ways. To give you a maximum amount of practice in a minimum amount of
time, you start many of these exercises from partial applications that you
download from our web site.

To help you learn more by reading less, all of the information in this book
is presented in "paired pages" with the essential syntax, guidelines, and
examples on the righthand page and the perspective and extra explanation on
the left. Programmers tell us how much they like this approach because it
lets them quickly find what they're looking for. This is particularly useful
for a language like Visual Basic because you simply can't remember the
hundreds of details that are required for effective programming.

After you read the first section of this book plus chapter 8, you can read
the chapters in section 2, 3, 4, or 5. In other words, you don't have to
read all 20 chapters in sequence. We refer to this as "modular
organization," and it lets you get the training you need when you need it.
Yes, there are some contingencies between some of the chapters, but we let
you know about them whenever they're critical.

With this book, you can learn the skills of a professional programmer in just 692 pages. Because of its self-paced approach in the first 7 chapters, you can do that whether you're new to Visual Basic.NET or you're upgranding from Visual Basic 6. From that point on, you're ready for rapid progress as you learn how to develop sophisticated GUIs, how to use the .NET classes for a wide variety of purposes, how to work with XML, how to develop database appplications with ADO.NET, and how to develop web applications with ASP.NET. To insure success, this book includes 18 complete business applications so you can see how the forms, controls, and code of Visual Basic applications work together. Applications like these should be a standard part of all programming books. BUT NO OTHER VB BOOK DOES THIS.