Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook 
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Author Matthew MacDonald
Publisher O'Reilly
Length 264 pages
vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5)
Reviewed by Robert Gelb

This is one of the first books in O'Reilly new Developer's Notebook series. It is designed to appeal to the early adopters. As such, it focuses on topics that are fairly new (as opposed to old and crusty ones?). The book somewhat resembles a notebook, complete with a fake coffee stain. Which, I should mention is great for tormenting loved ones ("I swear, I leave the book with you for 15 minutes and you get a stain on it").

My first impressions are favorable - the general format is that it picks a topic, presents an explanation and some source code. Then the author proceeds to solve a somewhat thorny issue having to do with a topic. There are a number of solutions, something like 40-50. So overall, this type of book is a middle ground between a "…in a nutshell" and a "…cookbook" formats.

If you don't look at the cover, it might look to you like you are reading a VB6 book. That's because VB 2005 (.NET has been dropped from the name) is probably the first one to bring back a host of features that were available for years in Visual Basic Classic.

Overall, the book pretty much covers the laundry list of the features that are expected the ship in the VS 2005 IDE + new language features: Edit & Continue, My Classes, IDE tricks, Partial Classes, Generics, Strongly Typed Config, the Background Worker Component, Double Buffering improvements to GDI+, Authentication, ClickOnce, etc…

Overall, the book reads very easily and is very useful. This alone sets it apart from the …Nutshell series, which are mostly tutorial/teaching guides. It remains to be seen whether the new format will be accepted by the marketplace, given that the series fills in a small niche between nutshell and cookbook.


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