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Visual Basic 2005 Jumpstart Review by Nicholas Oatridge
Poorly written but better than nothing
This book is aimed squarely at seasoned VB6 programmers and covers the new features in VB2005 reasonably well. The code is available at the O'Reilly web site, although I often timeout accessing downloads there. Annoyingly a lot of the links aren't online, so you have to type in URLs like one at Microsft that includes the text "/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=06616212-0356-46a0-8da2-eebc53a68034&displaylang=en" to access essential downloads needed to work through the examples. The book also appears to have originated as a project aimed at people converting to VB.Net so there are odd inconsistencies you need to figure out. Although it says it is suitable for the Express Edition of VB2005, it is really aimed more squarely at purchasers of Visual Studio 2005.
That the book has frogs on the front is quite appropriate since you will find yourself jumping around a lot. Figures are frequently on different pages to the text where they are referred and things you might have wanted to sort out before a chapter are raised later on.
I don't want to carp too much. Given the wealth of stuff still around about VB6 anything for VB2005 is to be welcomed. The author is clearly technically competent, if not the most fluent writer around.
A final point, if you think this book will help you port your apps from VB6 to VB2005 it only provides some broad guidelines. In virtually any instance migration is far from being a trivial activity and one that you are invariably better off avoiding. The book will help you migrate your skills, but you are probably better of re-writing your apps.