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Most of the thick books about VB.NET 2005 are now out. The new books now are more specialized, hows-this-for-a-new-angle books. The Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook is a great example. The title (and the cover art) make it a head-turner in the bookstore. What's this? Pan-fried programs? Cordon Bleu classes? The book itself continues the ruse, "... the recipe book that you have been looking for.


It's chock full of tasty software tidbits."

$49.99 (paper) ISBN: 0596101775 September 2006

An Anthology of Code

Personally, I prefer a little more straightforward approach and, I'm happy to say, after you get past the advertising, that's exactly what this anthology of Visual Basic .NET articles delivers. I have to admit it. It really is chock full of useful and interesting VB.NET programs.

The really thick books top a thousand pages because they duplicate much of what you can find online and in the Visual Basic Help system. Granted, every book I have ever read explains the fundamentals better than MSDN does it, but most of us don't really need a book to tell us how to do a For-Next loop. We need a book that explains the more obscure parts of VB.NET that MSDN really confuses. That's what this one does.

The authors state right up front that, "The Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook is primarily a reference book." But it's actually more than that. Although the topics are presented as individual articles and each stands on it's own, there is an overall organization that actually can make it a pretty good introduction to Visual Basic 2005, too.

The initial articles are pretty basic and explain fundamental details about how to get started. Anybody who has written a few programs will probably skip past them. After that, the book is organized around fundamental topics - strings, graphics, arrays, and so forth - that are in a pretty good tutorial sequence. So you could use this book as an introduction tutorial. The missing VB syntax is easy to find online.

The recipe metaphor holds up well in the selection of interesting examples. One of the chapters is focused on "Dates and Times" and features a "Phases of the Moon" program. How's that for an unusual recipe? My frequent collaborator Peter Zilahy Ingerman knows more about dates and times than anyone else I have ever met and he has agreed to try it out for us. You can check out this unique "point of view" expert review here.

Since I recently featured a home-coded but non-securecryptography example program here at About Visual Basic, I was especially interested in the chapter on "Cryptography and Compression". This chapter demonstrates how to code cryptography that is actually secure. But be sure to download the example programs from the O'Reilly web site before trying them. The code in the book can be hard to follow without a working example to reference. But it works! And it's a lot more clear and understandable than anything I've seen at Microsoft's site.

The recipe metaphor rings true in another way too. Have you ever tried to use a recipe with instructions like, "enfraginate the mixture with a leptoidinal rulthscue." And you're like, "Say WHAT?" Although the book doesn't use invented words (like I just did), it could use more detail for the less familiar concepts.

For example ...

The chapter on "Application Organization" starts out carefully explaining basic code like how to add a Class or a Structure. But then it suddenly shifts gears and presents a few pages about enabling the IDisposable Interface in a Class for resource management. They note that .NET cleans up after itself perfectly well so you only need this type of code for an external resource such as a database connection. Then they show you exactly the same template code that .NET adds to your program automatically. Since VB.NET Intellisense shows you this code as soon as you type "Implements IDisposable" after a Class header, there isn't too much value in showing it again in the book.

What you need is an example of what VB.NET doesn't show you, the "TO DO" parts of the code that would free up external resources. But the book doesn't show an example of that. (The chapter on databases doesn't either.)

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