Murach's ADO.NET 3.5, LINQ, and the Entity Framework by Anne Boehm, comes in both Visual Basic and C# 2008 versions.  Larry Blake reviews it.

Matthew MacDonald wrote Visual Basic and C# versions of this book, with the subtitle "From Novice to Professional".

Larry Blake reviews it.

With the wealth of tools available to software developers it can sometimes be quite a mission to find the right tool for the job at hand. Of course, the publishers of such tools will always claim that their tool is the best but this is a somewhat biased opinion. Enter "Windows Developer Power Tools".

A review of Murach's SQL Server 2005 for Developers tutorial and reference book, written by Scott Waletzko (Skystone Software).

  The average VB.NET developers' book starts  with the language and uses the IDE to help along the way.  This  book takes a different approach.  It starts with the IDE and radiates out from there.  (IDE-centric I think they  call it in the publisher's blurb).   It's an interesting approach, but does it work?

Ged Mead decided to find out.

   Francesco Balena has published his latest book on Visual Basic, this time turning his attention to the 2005 version of the language.

  Ged Mead reviewed this book.

   Murach have been producing technical books for more than 20 years and have developed their own special style and a quite substantial, loyal readership .   Their latest offering is "Murach's Visual Basic 2005".

   Ged Mead offers an overview of this book.   

  ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results from Wrox presents you with 12 projects that demonstrate different areas of the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. 

   David Jeavons reviews this book.

Every programmer concerned with application performance of the code they write needs to have a good profiler at hand. This must be used to profile your applications regularly to know what part of your code is negatively affecting performance. A paradox in programming is that often, poor performance is caused by bad application design and not bad code, but you cannot verify the application design until you have written some code. However, some good designs are hampered by bad code and a profiler can only point out the bottlenecks, it cannot change your code and/or design.

Bad code must be dealt with before a single line of code is written (so to speak).   This is achieved by acquiring some good coding habits and arming yourself with knowledge of the internal workings of a CPU, how your particular compiler works and how your high level code is optimized and translated to low-level machine code. This is where this book, and series thereof, comes in.

No Starch Press presents a great book that answers a lot of the fundamental questions of life, like "what is an array?" and "where do strings come from?"

Sybex have published two versions of this book:  "Mastering Visual Basic 2005" by Evangelos Petroutsos and "Mastering Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition" by Evangelos Petroutsos and Acey J. Bunch.

   Ged Mead takes a look at what they offer .

If you want to get up to speed with the majority of the new features offered by ASP.NET 2.0 then this is definitely one of the books that should be sitting on your bookshelf.

This book is aimed at those developers who already have a working knowledge of ASP.NET 1.x but does not require the developer to have knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0. The main goal of the book is to introduce the new features of ASP.NET 2.0, but unlike a standard reference book that will simply discuss each new control and all of its properties and methods the author has taken a different approach and has instead decided to introduce these new controls by building a fully functional website for a fictitious Pub. The website is called "TheBeerHouse" and incorporates such features as Newsletters, Opinion Polls, Forums and even an E-Commerce section among many other cool features. The website for this book can be viewed here.

The full title of this book is "ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming, Problem - Design - Solution" and each chapter is laid out in three parts. The first part outlines the problem that will be overcome in the chapter, the second part discusses the design that will be implemented to overcome the problem and the third part implements the code discussed in the design section. I found that this format works really well, especially if you are relatively new to website programming as the author takes you through every detail that he himself faced when designing the website.   So, rather than simply saying which design he will implement, he discusses all of the possible designs that he may have implemented and goes through the pros and cons of each one before then detailing the reasons for choosing a particular design. This actually gives you a good understanding of the different options that you have available to you for various problems and the reasons why you may choose one over the other based on the scenario you face at the time.

  Wrox have published a wide range of ASP.NET 2.0 books for a variety of developer skill and knowledge levels.    This one is aimed at ASP.NET beginners.

  Ged Mead reviews this book.

    "Visual Web Developer 2005 Expression Edition For Dummies" by Alan Simpson is a recent publication in this ever-popular, long running series of books.

   Although not the usual 600+ page  coder's book, don't be too quick to write this one off as of no use, advises DevCity reviewer Ged Mead.  It may be more useful than you think.

 If you are a complete newcomer to programming, you should seriously consider getting a copy of this book.  It never loses sight of the fact that beginners don’t always “get it” first time, every time and it uses non-technical explanations and good learning reinforcement techniques to show you the skills in the easiest, least complicated way possible.

    In the Preface to the book, author Wallace Wang sets out his philosophy:

“This book is dedicated to everyone who didn’t have the “right” education, test scores or job skills, but wound up succeeding at their chosen goal anyway.   If you want to learn or do anything in your life, such as learn to program a computer, go ahead and do it and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

A review of Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Web Programming With C# tutorial and reference book, written by Scott Waletzko (Skystone Software).

Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic.NET

By Ted Pattison and Dr Joe Hummel

is published by Addison-Wesley as part of their Microsoft.NET Development Series.   

   Ged Mead reviewed this book for VBCity readers.

I recently received my copy of Visual Studio 2005. I have been waiting for months to put the new features to the test. To assist me in that process I chose Murach's ASP.Net Upgrader's Guide. I chose Murach's book due to my success with their other books. I prefer C# so I have chosen the C# edition.