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Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition For Dummies Review by Bruce Kirkpatrick
Battle Lines Are Drawn On This One!
You know when you find a book with only very high and very low reviews that you are likely to love it or hate it. Most programming books are very detail/left brain oriented. Not surprising as the majority of programmers are as well. A few are right brain/big picture based. Either can be written at an introductory or advanced level. The problem is that if a left brain person reads a right brain type book they will hate it and vice versa. This book is one of the big picture/just what you need at the moment right brain books. This had also been the orientation and market positioning of VB since it's inception until .net and had made it the most used programming language going. Along the way the author does take many pot shots at Microsoft moving VB so far away from it's roots with .net. This move has indeed caused VB to lose ground in the market. Programmer thinking would appear to be "If the new VB is this hard to learn, I might as well work in another language that pays more." If shots at Microsoft bother you, you will have a problem with this book. The author feels that Microsoft has moved VB back towards it's roots with the Express edition. This would appear to be true.
One major slam this book has gotten is the lack of full blown line by line projects. Given the orientation of the book, this is probably a valid complaint. A right brainer might be oriented towards "Just give me the main building blocks, let me put them together the way I want, and discover the others later when I need them." This approach would likely leave everyone else stuck.
As someone who taught programming for over 10 years and now works in industry building data mining tools (primarily using MS products), I am very impressed with the content that WAS included in this book.
I believe that the addition of a couple more short end to end examples early on and a bit of moderation of the MS bashing (though justified) would have greatly expanded the position of this book as a mainstream "one stop shopping" introductory text. As it is, it is a great suppliment to one of the more dry "cookbook" type offerings that are out there everywhere.
Bruce Kirkpatrick
MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, OCP, ...