The book contains 17 chapters of high quality content. It
begins with a short coverage about the creation of Windows Forms, Console and
ASP.NET applications. I feel that the creation of console applications should
be discussed first. The next chapter examines the various factors associated
with the Visual Basic 2005 development environment such as creation of code
snippets, accessing environment variables and registry in addition to a brief
coverage about obfuscating an application. It would have been great if the
authors had also examined some recipes targeting Visual Basic 2005 Express
Edition.
While chapter 3 examines classes and namespaces, Chapter 4
provides comprehensive coverage of Forms, Menus, usage of Timers, creation of
shortcut menus and much more. The remaining chapters provide a detailed
coverage of Strings, Numbers, Arrays and Collections, Graphics, Multimedia,
Printing, Files and Databases in addition to the usage of Math, Date and Time
classes. I am impressed by the efforts put up by the authors to provide a high
quality programming book in a comprehensive manner.
Among other recipes you will also learn about the creation
of a Graph paper, Thumbnails and many other interesting topics. I wonder why
the authors have included the Graph paper creation in Chapter 11 – Printing.
From my point of view, the recipe should be accommodated in Chapter 9 –
Graphics. You will also learn some of the advanced tips and tricks such as
accessing XML files, verifying a credit card number and rebooting the system in
Chapter 14.
While chapter 15 examines Exception handling, Chapter 16
provides a detailed coverage of Cryptography and Compression. The book wraps up
with an exhaustive coverage of web development and it includes recipes for
pinging an IP Address, Calling a Web service, Sending Email using SMTP, Sending
a message to another computer and much more.
The writing style followed by the author is very lucid and
each chapter has been presented in a systematic format such as Problem,
Solution and Discussion. The problem section specifies the purpose of each
recipe. The Solution section provides answers to solve the specific recipe and
also specifies the folder in which the relevant source code is located. The
Discussion section includes a detailed explanation along with complete source
code and relevant screenshot(s). I hope the screenshot(s) will surely help
readers to view the output before attempting to run it on their system. The See
Also section provides references to other useful resources for learning more
about the discussed recipe.