I picked this book up at a discount book store. While VB 2005 is dead as of March 2010 with Microsoft no longer offering the 2005 express edition I have the full blown developer edition and figured it would be a nice thing to read. Took me 3 hours to go though all 15 chapters, reading and doing the exercises.

I’ll keep it on my self for a while. Sections that may be of intrest for a VB 6 programmer going to VB.NET are as follows:

Chapter 5 – The Parse and ToString Methods – page 84
Chapter 6 – AndAlso Operator – page 107
Chapter 6 – OrElse Operator – page 109
Chapter 6 – Xor Operator – page 110
Chapter 7 – Exceptions (TryParse) – page 124
Chapter 7 – The IS Keyword – page 135
Chapter 10 – Diaglog Forms – page 188 thru 194
Chapter 11 – Text Editor Project – page 217 thru 219
Chapter 12 – Associating code with clicks of Toolbar Buttons – page 233
Chapter 13 – Open and save file Dialogs Boxes – page 240
Chapter 13 – Reading from a Text File – pages 246 thru 249
Chapter 13 – Writing to a text file – page 250 thru 252
Chapter 14 – Databases - Filling the DataGridView - page 271 – while it’s with an access database with persistent connection it uses code to create the actual dataadapters not the menus which is somewhat nice for a beginner vb.net person comming from a vb 6 background. But you vb 6 people must learn the menus for all this once you understand what a data adapter is and does.
Chapter 15 – Web Applications – Creating a database web application – Page 292 thru 297 – Nice little section showing how to do what we did in chapter 14 databases above.

Final review of the book is that for a very basic beginer it’s quite nice. Was it worth the 3 (three)  dollars I paid for it? Sure I think so.