Paul Ballard's WebLog

.NET All Day.... .NET All Night. The semi-coherent ramblings of a sleep deprived mind.

VB.NET Is Still Object Oriented, Isn't it?

My brother has decided that he wants to learn about .NET programming and asked if I could help him learn about VB.NET. Now the last time I taught him anything it was how to play chess when we were teenagers and after just three months he was routinely kicking my butt. I wanted to make sure he got started off on the right foot and went to the local bookstore to get him a book on learning VB.NET.

While parusing the books though, I realized that in an entire shelf of books specific to VB.NET, published by companies like Wrox, Microsoft Press, and Sams, not ONE SINGLE BOOK contained even a chapter on object oriented programming. Not one!

Thinking this must be an oversight I checked the C# books and sure enough, the books I checked all had chapters on object oriented programming. Why then don't VB.NET books contain at least a mention of OO? If not the publishers then surely the authors should understand the importance of laying the proper foundation before diving into the WinForms designer or ADO.NET. Don't they?

That's not to say that books on OO with VB.NET don't exist. My buddy Dan Clark wrote a good one and I know that there are others. But in one of the biggest stores of the second largest bookstore chain in the country in the 4th largest city in the country, I couldn't find a single book on VB.NET that included object oriented programming. If there is a message in there somewhere, I really don't like it.
Posted: Feb 20 2006, 09:56 AM by PaulBallard | with 5 comment(s)
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Comments

AndrewSeven said:

Even though the languages have the same capabilities (
via the CLR) there are fundamental cultural differences in how people approach using the various tools.

MS has named the 3 basic profiles : Mort, Elvis and Einstein.

The books ( and other learning materiels) for many languages target one group more than the others.

The keywords for the various OO things are different than some of the "industry standard" terms, so it might not be the best language for learning OO...
# February 20, 2006 12:39 PM

lynn eriksen said:

Here is one that I used to learn the basics.

Althought it is an ASP.net book - it gives a lot of good coverage to vb.net.



http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1861007337/sr=8-10/qid=1140469371/ref=sr_1_10/002-1771167-4656056?%5Fencoding=UTF8

I don't know if the Vb.net 2003 version of this book gives as much oo introduction
# February 20, 2006 4:06 PM

Benjimawoo said:

I found VB.NET Unleashed (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067232234X/sr=8-1/qid=1140523844/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3712327-7077658?%5Fencoding=UTF8) by Paul Kimmel was very OO focused.

If I remember rightly, in fact, all the sameples etc. were straight I-wrote-this-in-notepad code demos of OO principles at work, rather than swanky designers and tools.

I might be remembering wrong, though. The book got stolen and I haven't replaced it yet...
# February 21, 2006 7:13 AM

jay said:

This addresses it quite well

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596001460/ref=sr_11_1/103-2875854-3655848?%5Fencoding=UTF8

# February 23, 2006 9:21 AM

Me said:

Maybe it's a message that VB programmers have been hiding behind the "object based" design, while C++/C# developers have been well versed in OOP for years.
# March 10, 2006 1:50 PM
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