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OOP with Microsoft Visual Basic NET and Microsoft
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Rating: 3.73/5 from 22 reviews Classic VB'ers - Learn Real OOP and C# While You're at It.An excellent teacher's textThe Good I chose this book for a class in object-oriented programming that I gave in November 2002. For the most part, I was very pleased with this book, and the feedback I received about it from my students was positive as well. The author did a good job of explaining the concepts clearly and concisely, and most of the book is dedicated to the step-by-step completion of hands-on exercises. For this particular class, I relied on the book for most of the instruction and hands-on portions, and I found that this book worked very well for a one week long class. I personally thought that it was very useful to have both Visual Basic and C# examples side-by-side in the book. However, I did notice that when typing in the labs from the book, students often would type the VB code instead of the C# (C# was the language used for this particular class). The fact that the examples all worked and were very clearly explained in the text both were huge positives for me. If I were teaching the class over again, I think I would definitely choose this book once more. If I were a student looking to learn object-oriented programming by example, then this would be a good book to pick up. If I wanted to learn more about the design and theory behind of OOP, another book would probably be a better choice. There were only a few things about this book that I didn't care for or that I received negative feedback from students on. The first one isn't the book's fault at all, and that is the fact that all of the examples are for windows forms. As an ASP.NET programmer myself, I would have preferred to have seen the book use ASP.NET for more of its examples. This was a very minor complaint, however. Also, although I very much liked the support for both VB and C#, I think that something should be done within the text to ensure that the C# and VB code samples are set apart more obviously. Many students were confused by this and would end up looking at or even typing in the wrong code for examples because the VB and C# code was interspersed without much visual separation. The single biggest complain I received from students about the text was that the examples were very difficult to relate to. These were IT workers with experience building ASP and VB applications, and they were disappointed by the samples because they did not correspond to anything that they could see themselves writing in the workplace. The bank account samples were the exception to this, and were well-received, but the card games and vector algebra applications ended up detracting from students' abilities to grasp the concepts involved because they were too busy trying to figure out what the game or mathematical program was doing. A greater focus on business problem domain examples would have helped many of my students, I think, to relate to the topics being described by the examples. Very disappointedVery ambiguous and confusing in places. Heck, page 1, paragraph 1, the author decided to use an example to illustrate what a "class" (as in the blueprint for objects) is. Unfortunately, she chooses to use a college registration illustration, which includes "classes" (as in a college classroom). She then goes on to talk about a "class" a dozen times or more, quite often not being clear if she's talking about the OOP class or the thing the student goes to. Does "class registration" mean when the student goes to sign-up for his class, or when you're initializing the class to create student objects in your code? Again, all this is page 1, paragraph 1. More examples of confusion and ambiguity show up frequently. I am disappointed. | ||||||||||||||||||||
Overall this is a good book to purchase for someone starting out in OOP from a VB background or is using C# as their first modern OOP language. The flow of the book is easy with lots of code samples. Note that every example has both VB and C# code. For this reason, I will be highly recommending this book to classic VB'ers. While it helps move the developer into OOP, they can quickly learn how to read in C#. Despite the loyalty that many have to VB and that "Edit and Continue" is back with Whidbey, reading C# is career critical.
I particularly like Chapter 10 - Using Classes Interchangeably Through Polymorphism. I admit, I'm not much of a graphics person, but this was a great example of using classes and abstracting the requirement of numerous class names. Many of the examples are simple in nature and only one is a console app. Despite the simplicity of the concept of the examples, the codes are rich in OOP technology.
For those coming from a Java or C++ background, they need not pick it up the for themselves. There are a few items that very quickly will cause some readers to lose credibility in the text quickly. Ms. Reynolds-Haertle takes a few liberties to help the VB (pre .NET) developer understand some terms. For example, on page 9 the author states,
In this book, I use the word set to mean changing a property. I use the word get to mean retrieving the value of a property. The Get ans Set blocks as a property can be called getters and setters, or accessors.
While I use to refer to properties as getters and setters, I have changed my vocab to reflect java and C++ standards and the standards of many other C# professionals. Therefore, I would never refer to both of these as accessors. I use the terms accessors and mutators respectively. Interestingly, several books on my shelf from the .NET camp refer to only accessors. So maybe I harp for no reason. What do you think?
In conslusion, VB'ers get this book! Then follow up with several of the books listed in the references. You will be on your way to writing efficient code.