Introduction

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Page xix

Introduction

THIS BOOK ACTUALLY BEGAN in Athens, Greece in 1993. Evangelos Petroutsos wrote a very interesting outline, and several sample chapters, for a book about "fascinating and sophisticated things" you could do with Visual Basic. I agreed with my publisher that his ideas had potential, but Evangelos was a first-time author. I had a track record, though, so the publisher said they'd invest in this "Power Toolkit" book if I agreed to co-author it. Even a small book represents a $50,000 gamble for a publishing house, and this was a very large book.

I merrily agreed because I thought the topics were compelling—fractals, encryption, processing graphics, animated transitions, multimedia, manipulating color palettes, recursion, and other topics that were largely ignored by other VB books. To our delight, the book became a runaway bestseller in 1995. Evidently many Visual Basic programmers were ready for a book about advanced, cutting-edge programming techniques.

In 2002, we decided to revisit this concept. Nearly a decade has passed, and we now have what amounts to a brand new Visual Basic language: VB.NET. We decided to follow the same path that we went down a decade ago: to explore aspects of VB.NET that have been largely ignored in other books, but are useful or interesting, or both.

Most of the topics covered ten years ago in the previous book are not repeated here—times have changed. But we feel that the subjects explored in this new book are compelling in their own right.

Aesthetics

Why would captivating topics be largely ignored in computer books? We think there are two primary reasons. The first category of ignored topics is seen as "trivial" or "marginal." Put another way, these subjects involve aesthetics. Programmers by and large prefer to consider themselves part of the scientific community, so examining such unscientific concepts as beauty or appearance seems to many programmers to be a step down. Two of the chapters in this book, nonetheless, boldly explore aesthetic subjects.

Truth be told, programming is an art, not a science. Some professors conjure up theoretical constructs and special terminology, but airy obfuscation and lofty-sounding jargon do not, by themselves, create a science—and all too often actually inhibit rational discourse.

Studies have shown that the best programmers are frequently English or music majors. Some of the best developers around today got into programming when they purchased their first Amiga computer—an early machine devoted to the creative side of computing. And although academic programming is generally allied with mathematics departments, there is very little real relationship between

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