Inexperienced developers will find this book more useful than experienced developers. Besides walking readers through their first steps in Visual Basic (VB) 2008, the author covers basic software engineering topics, including software development approaches, programming algorithms, programming guidelines, software testing concepts, and object-oriented programming. The book also introduces Microsoft VB 2008 Express Edition, the lightweight (and freeware) version of VB 2008.

Gross is a competent writer who has already written on similar topics [1,2], as well as on programming topics in general. The experienced reader who is not familiar with VB 2008, but who has theoretical or practical experience in other programming languages, will be able to skip many pages of the book. The explanation of VB 2008 topics is inextricably mixed with the explanation of software engineering topics. To learn about VB 2008 operators, for example, the reader will have to read (or more probably, skip) pages and pages explaining algorithms.

As an experienced reader, I would expect a book covering a programming language to start with the usual sequential explanation of variables, operators, statements, and functions. This book doesn’t follow this approach, adding an element of unfamiliarity. Moreover, the book doesn’t contain a reference section, which might be due to the fact that Microsoft already provides a good online reference.

The book is example driven: the concepts are explained through detailed examples and relevant illustrations, which can be quite helpful. That said, inexperienced readers will find that they often need another reference to understand some topics that are mentioned but not covered in the book, or at least not covered in the book when the reader is expecting them to be covered. While the book extensively covers the theoretical aspects of VB 2008, including .NET Generics, application configuration, multithreading, and .NET language-integrated query (LINQ), readers will typically find that they will have to progress to the next book in the series [3] before being able to start developing anything more complex than a demo project (in which case, the two books might have just been combined into one). Similarly, databases are addressed only briefly in the book, and covered more extensively by Huddleston and Agarwal [4].

This approach of spreading content across several books might be appreciated by readers who want a taste of VB 2008 before deciding whether to invest time and resources in studying the language in depth. Other publishers, such as Wrox, have opted for a similar approach, with three different titles on VB [5,6,7] and an additional title to be used as a reference guide [8].