Why Another VB Book?

There are literally hundreds of books lining the shelves on how to program using Visual Basic, and they will no doubt be joined by a flood of books on how to program in VB.NET. The majority of these books assume that you're a complete novice and slowly introduce you to such concepts as variables , arrays, and looping structures.

This is a different kind of book, however. It is a detailed, professional reference to the VB.NET language ” a reference that you can turn to if you want to jog your memory about a particular language element or a particular parameter. You're also looking for a reference that you can turn to when you're having difficulty programming and need to review the rules for using a particular language element, or when you want to check that there isn't some "gotcha" you've overlooked that is associated with a particular language element.

In addition, we believe this book will serve as the main reference for VB 6 programmers who are upgrading to VB.NET. To this end, we have devoted considerable space to the extensive language differences between VB 6 and VB.NET. For each relevant language entry, we have included a "VB.NET/VB 6 Differences" section that details the differences in the operation of the language element between VB 6 and VB.NET.