How to Use This Book


If you are an experienced Visual Basic .NET programmer, you may want to skim the language basics covered in the first parts of the book. You may find a few new features that have appeared in Visual Basic 2005, so you probably shouldn’t skip these chapters entirely, but most of the basic language features are the same as in previous versions.

Intermediate programmers and those with less experience with Visual Basic .NET should take these chapters a bit more slowly. The chapters in Part II, “Object-Oriented Programming,” cover particularly tricky topics. Learning all the variations on inheritance and interfaces can be rather confusing.

Beginners should spend more time on these first chapters because they set the stage for the material that follows. It will be a lot easier for you to follow a discussion of file management or regular expressions if you are not confused by the error-handling code that the examples take for granted.

Programming is a skill best learned by doing. You can pick up the book and read through it quickly if you like, but the information is more likely to stick if you open the Visual Basic .NET development environment and experiment with some programs of your own. Normally, when I read a new programming book, I work through every example myself, modifying the code to see what happens if I try different things not covered by the author. I experiment with new variations and pay particular attention to errors, which are hard to cover completely in a book. It’s one thing to read about strongly typed collections; it’s another to build one yourself using data that is meaningful to you.

Learning by doing may encourage you to skip sections of the book. For example, Chapter 1 covers the IDE in detail. After you’ve read for a while, you may want to skip some sections and start experimenting with the environment on your own. I encourage you to do so. Lessons learned by doing stick better than those learned by reading. Later, when you have some experience with the development environment, you can go back and examine Chapter 1 in more detail to learn more advanced customization techniques.

The final part of the book is a Visual Basic .NET reference. These appendixes present more concise, categorized information about the language. You can use these appendixes to recall the details of specific operations. For example, you can read Chapter 9 to learn which controls are useful for different purposes. Then use Appendix G to learn about specific controls’ properties, methods, and events.

Throughout your work, you can also refer to the appendixes to get information on specific classes, controls, and syntax. For example, you can quickly find the syntax for declaring a generic class in Appendix L. If you need more information on generics, you can find it in Chapter 19 or the online help. If you just need to refresh your memory of the basic syntax, however, scanning Appendix L will be faster.




Visual Basic 2005 with  .NET 3.0 Programmer's Reference
Visual Basic 2005 with .NET 3.0 Programmer's Reference
ISBN: 470137053
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 417

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