If you are a FoxPro programmer and are required to start programming in Visual Studio .NET, or just need to learn some of the basics of .NET, because you see this in your future, than this book is for you.
Pinter is one of those programming geniuses who understands the workings of a language and can present it in an understandable way. He makes clear those things you just stare at and can't make out.
I like walkthroughs, it's the best way for me to understand what is going on in the creation of an application, and this book is one of those that took me through both a FoxPro and a VB .NET application that can access both a FoxPro database and a SQL Server database, from the same application.
The book came out in May of 2004, but was written before that, and uses VFP 7, VFP 8, VB .NET 2002, and SQL Server 2000, but you can still go through the code in VFP 9, VB .NET 2003, and SQL Server 2005. It still works, but there are newer ways to do things that should make it easier in both VFP 9 and the newly released VB .NET 2005, but don't let this stop you, it's still a great book.
The book covers .ASP and Database access over the Internet which is the future, no matter what anybody says, and we have to learn about this in great detail, and Pinter explains it all in a manner which even my old brain can understand. However, building .ASP .NET applications in Visual Studio 2005 will make all previous .ASP .NET books obsolete in my opinion. You still need the basics, though.
I'm the type that reads manuals, and I read every sentence of the book, so I found most of the glaring errors. Some were due to differences between the downloadable code and the code in the book, others were oversites, like making a phone number field 10 characters, but I was able to get around the differences, and a bunch of other problem errors that I promptly made a list of and sent off to the publisher, hoping that a new version of the book will be forthcoming in the future using the current development environments.
The ability to access two different databases (FoxPro and SQL Server) with just a few lines of code in the same FoxPro or VB .NET program, the ability to finally figure out how to make a standard form that can be used in all my applications, and Pinter's straight shooting make this one of the better books in getting up to speed with .NET.
