What You Need to Know About This Book | Programming Visual Basic 2005

This book assumes you are already a Visual Basic programmer (probably VB6, but possibly VB.NET Version 1.x). Thus, I'm not going to explain what an if statement is. (If you don't know what an if statement is, or if you just want a thorough review, please read Chapters 16 to 18, which provide a primer on the Visual Basic 2005 language and object-oriented programming. We stuck them in the back so that you can ignore them if you'd like.)

If this is your first programming language, don't panic, you will learn everything you need to know as we go. You might want to take a quick peek at Chapter 16 now and again if you're feeling lost.

This book includes notes along the way pointing out especially dangerous pitfalls for VB6 and VB.NET 1.x programmers.

While Visual Basic is now a fully object-oriented language, we're not going to start with an introduction to the theory of object-oriented programming. It will be much more satisfying, and much more effective, just to start programming with objects, and I'll include sidebars that explain the theory in context.

If you really want a primer on object-oriented programming, be sure to read Chapter 18, which I wrote at the insistence of my editor. It is boring, but at least it is short.

Most important, I'm not going to waste your time. You won't find a long treatise on why .NET is great. (It is great, but you are here already, and what is the point of selling you on a technology you've already bought?) You also won't find a theoretical exposition on the role of .NET framework or on all the associated tools; instead you'll use the tools and the framework, and I'll put it all in context as we go about our business of building applications.

Finally, I'm not going to waste your time by filling pages with material that is otherwise freely available. I'll show you how to get the information you need, but I won't waste page after page with tables listing all the properties and methods of each class; that information is already available to you in the built-in help files.