Some books leave you with a little; some books leave you with a lot...
I finished reading Paul Vick's recent book - The Visual Basic .NET Programming Language - tonight and thought that I'd post my feelings about it.
Being a seasoned VB programmer I've learnt a lot about the language from some very smart people over the years - including people on the VB Team itself - and I was therefore keen to get my hands on Paul Vick's latest book to learn some further insights from one of the lead architects of the language.
The book itself is a brisk walk - coming in at a touch under 400 pages (which includes many reference-only pages) - but is crammed with useful nuggets about the language and how to put it to use. I read the book in a little under a week while travelling to and from work; at the end of each journey I was usually racing for my computer so that I could whip up some demo's of the things which I had read. In fact most times after reading a couple of paragraphs I was left thinking to myself: "So does that mean? ....".
Some of my favourite sections were:
- Boxing and Unboxing - some of the clearest examples that I've ever read on the topic
- Array Co-variance - very good; some of this was certainly new to me
- Events and Delegates - a good mixture of high-level versus under the covers material
- Statements - it's always good to learn new things about these
The book is structured in such a manner that it starts out easy and ends up with expert-level stuff. The stuff which taught me the most came near the end of the book with several chapters devoted to the advanced topics surrounding Object Oriented concepts, but I must admit that I learnt *at least* one new thing per Chapter.
This book will serve 2 purposes for me now that I've scanned it for a first time. Firstly it will serve as my main reference for all of those things which I never can seem to remember first time such as: Fundamental DataType storage size; comparing things other than non-equality in Select...Case statements; passing ByRef vs ByVal and where it *does* matter; in depth behaviour of Shadows, Overrides and Overloads modifiers; How to call Win32 api's using Declare statements. Secondly, this book will become my digest of all those little language quirks which I have built up in my head over the years.
Lastly, after reading chapters and sharing some of this stuff with my co-workers it would undoubtedly invoke many colorful conversations about programming adventures from the near and distant past.
All-in-all this book left me with a lot!