Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! (PRO-Developer) [Kindle Edition]

I bought two books to help me with a small VB program I needed to write. I have a little conceptual knowledge of programming from a long time ago.
This book is written specifically for VB Express Edition. I opened the book and was lost in the first two pages. I already knew it was not going to be the answer. I switched to VB 2008 by Michael Halvorson and completed my program with little difficulty. A few times I went back to this book, but could never figure out what I needed. I found much greater help online than in this book. I am an educator. I know there are people who know their subject matter and others who can teach their subject matter. Patrice Pelland's Build a Program Now may be technically correct, but a beginning programmer will not be helped by this book.

Overall, this is a useful product for intermediate users. The book does not clearly state that the CD included is actually a DVD, which is a slight inconvenience. It's not worth the 20 bucks new, but definately worth the cost used, being that it's already almost 3 years old. My advice is to first check and see if there is something better and more recent before purchasing this product.

I bought this book hoping to learn how to write Visual Basic code. After thoroughly reading it, I now realize that it is really more about the Visual Studio Express 2008 environment and has very little to do with writing event-handling code (or any other kind of code, for that matter).

To be fair, it does cover a number of features that will probably be of interest to experienced VB developers. It contains a large number of internet links to other resources for more information. It does a fair job of explaining the basic visual design elements. If my goal had been to build the minimalist custom browser interface the book walks you through building, it would have been okay.

When all is said and done, though, I have little more idea about how to write Visual Basic code than when I started. The book should have contained more "how-to code" information and linked to it less. And I am already well supplied with perfectly good and far more functional browsers, thank you very much.

This book is certainly not well targeted for the beginning audience it claims to have been written for. Frankly, I'm not sure what audience would have really benefitted from it.

I wish I had a recommendation for a better book, but unfortunately all I can do is to recommend that beginning programmers stay away from it.