I was excited to hear that Francesco was writing this book.
Certainly, there's no shortage of books on Visual Basic. At our magazine, Visual Basic Programmer's Journal, we see stacks of development books sent to us every week. Reading another Visual Basic book is about as exciting as seeing yet another grid control.
But what Francesco is doing is important for several reasons. First, anything he writes is going to be good. We know that because he is one of our most respected magazine authors, and he's a popular speaker at our VBITS conferences from San Francisco to Stockholm. Beyond that, he brings a pragmatic real-world view to everything he writes. He's an actual Visual Basic developer and has a unique eye for tips, tricks, and techniques that make his readers more productive in their work.
Finally, the project itself, how he's defined his book, fills an important gap. His book is a truly comprehensive look at Visual Basic from a professional developer's perspective. I don't know of anything quite like it.
There are three general types of books for developers. The first are the ones rushed out to grab sales when the product initially ships. These are of value but have inherent problems. They are by nature hurried and are based on working with beta releases, whose feature sets may or may not exactly match the final release. Also, as Visual Basic gets more complex, those early book authors simply lack the time to learn the tool in depth. Next come the "build a complete data warehouse in 7 days" books, aimed at exploiting less skilled wannabe developers by making unrealistic promises. Then there are the massive, vertical tomes that probe one subject in depth. These are generally more valuable. But if your work is broad, you end up collecting a dozen of these and never read them all.
What Francesco is doing is fundamentally different. He has spent over a year and a half, from the early beta to the latest updates, learning Visual Basic and using it for professional development. He's sharing that hard-won knowledge in a book that's almost encyclopedic in scope. As a developer, you know that the product is getting deeper and much more complex with every release. Mastering it takes much more work than before.
Francesco's book can help you get to work faster, perhaps helping you learn a few things you wouldn't have discovered on your own. The book is not a rehashing of the language manuals, as so many of the larger books are, but an extensive compiling of coding techniques that are the results of Francesco's own work. Tutorials span HTML, Dynamic HTML, scripting, and ASP programming—topics sorely missing from Visual Basic's documentation.
This is an ambitious project I'm confident any Visual Basic developer, from intermediate to experienced, can benefit from.
Sincerely,
James E. Fawcette
President
Fawcette Technical Publications
Producers of VBPJ, VBITS, JavaPro, Enterprise Development, The Development Exchange family of Web sites, and other information services for developers.