by Dan Clark
Publisher: Apress

To me “introduction” books are always an interesting venture. Some are great experiences, and others are nightmares. This book was a pretty good experience. Except for a few bumps in the road it was a pretty smooth ride. In the chapter summary below I will go into a little more detail on the positive and negative points.

Chapter Summary:

Chapter 1: Overview of Object Oriented Programming
This chapter starts with a very brief overview of the history of OOP. Brief is good. It also has brief definitions of OOP characteristics; Objects, Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, Inheritance, and Aggregation. It ends with a blurb about the history of VB.

Chapter 2: Designing OOP Solutions: Identifying the Class Structure &
Chapter 3: Designing OOP Solutions: Modeling the Object Interaction
These chapters go into UML and things like Use Cases, Class Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams, and Activity diagrams. This seemed exciting to me because I never really get into anything like this on the job, and I wanted to know a little more about it. Well, while interesting this ended up being a bump in the road for me.

The Author says to either do the exercises with a UML Modeler you can download from the net, or creating the diagram by hand. Well, I wanted to try the tool he used in the examples so I downloaded it. At this point just let me say that you should be prepared to spend a lot of time figuring out the tool if you decide to try it. It is not easy. The directions for doing the exercises don’t quite flow with actually using the tool either. The author does state that it is pretty tricky to use, but I really feel that the directions for these exercises should have been better. I managed to get through some of the examples in chapters 2 and 3 after a couple of hours, but I finally gave up and went to pencil and paper in interests of not losing my entire weekend. I would recommend that readers should use the pencil and paper approach to save a lot of time.

Chapter 4: Designing OOP Solutions: A Case Study
This chapter talks about the process by which one would design an OOP solution with a case study. The Author goes into good detail about the actual steps needed, and does a good job explaining the methodology by which this is accomplished. He also gives some good advice on how to avoid some of the more common pitfalls of designing an OOP solution.

Chapter 5: Introducing VB .NET
This chapter gives an overview of VB.Net as well as the .Net Framework. After the overview it gives you a hands on tour of the Visual Studio .Net IDE. Of course, you will need to have the IDE to do the tour. This tour shows you many of the screens, option settings, and menus of Visual Studio .Net. The second exercise shows you the debugging features of VS .Net. At his point you will need files that you can download from the following location on the Apress web site: http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=90&sID=538
I may have missed it, but I never saw any mention that downloading files was needed for the exercises. It certainly was not at the beginning of this exercise, and I think their should be some kind of direction about it present. Anyway, once you have the downloaded files the tutorial goes perfect.

Chapter 6: Creating Classes
This chapter is all about classes. How to restrict them, access to them, creating methods, overloading methods, using constructors to name some topics. This chapter too has exercises you complete with VS .Net. They all seemed to work fine for me, and were very easy to follow.

Chapter 7: Creating Class Hierarchies &
Chapter 8: Implementing Object Collaboration
These chapters discuss things like inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, delegation, error handling, shared properties and methods to new a few. These two chapters also have multiple hands-on activities so you can continue to learn how to operate VS .Net as well as learn more concepts of OOP. These activities are well documented, and I had no problems completing them all without incident.

Chapter 9: OSO Application Revisited: Implementing the Business Logic
This chapter helps bring together all the ideas you were introduced to in chapter 4. From there it goes into data access by talking about stored procedures, ADO.net, sqlclient namespace, and many other details. In order to do the examples you will have to have SQL Server. All the examples work, and are pretty interesting. Again, this is all done using the VS.net IDE so you continue to become more familiar with it.

Chapter 10: Developing Windows Applications
This is a fun chapter that talks about windows forms, event handlers, dialog boxes and different types of bound controls. This chapter is full of hands on activities that are well done. They all worked fine for me, and really helped me become familiar more familiar with the IDE.

Chapter 11: Developing Web Applications
This long chapter deals with web forms, server controls, server control inheritance, server-side event processing, ASP.net, state, and many other things. It is all about designing an application for the web. The activities are easy to follow, and work.

Chapter 12: Wrapping Up and Reviewing
A quick summation of what the book covers and some tips on where to focus next.

Appendix A: Fundamental Programming Concepts
This appendix is basically a primer for beginning programmers. It defines terms and concepts. There are some good definitions and explanations. It would be a good knowledge builder for a beginner.

Appendix B: Exception Handling in VB .NET
A quick 4-page explanation of how exceptions are handled in VB.Net

After finishing this book I had a hard time deciding what grade to give it. I ended up giving it a 7 out of 10. The many problems I had with the UML activities using the UML modeler were just too painful and frustrating to give it higher than a 7.

I will admit that the rest of the book was great and would be very useful to a beginner trying to become more familiar with VB.net and VS.net. The VS.net activities were flawless, and gave good hands-on experience that beginners would love. The UML material was actually good as well, but the problems with the modeling tool activities really influenced my final judging of the book.

In summation, this book is without doubt a beginner’s book. Do not buy this if you already basically familiar with VS .net or UML. If you do it will be very disappointing for you. If you are a beginner and do the UML activities with pen and paper I believe it will be a great learning experience.