Rating: 

Although I received this book as a gift, I likely would have purchased it myself, as I am very excited about the prospects of .NET, and am anxious to begin using .NET technologies.

It took no time at all to discern the portions of the text written by Mr. Roman. The degree of superfluity increases exponentially in his sections, and in some instances, borders on inaccuracy. In particular, having spent a great deal of time in ASP and web-based user interfaces myself, the frequent characterizations of VB6 as a technology inadequate for web development struck me as ill-considered.

The perfect example of Mr. Romans nascent desire to display his technological prowess can be found on page 36 of my first edition - the formal, mathematical definition of an array. The section is set off by itself, is not referred to again in the text, and is even qualified with the following:

"Many authors of programming books misuse the terms associated with arrays, so let's begin by establishing the correct terminology. In fact, if you will indulge us, we would like to begin with a formal definition of the term array."

Since I've been misusing the terms associated with arrays for all of these years, maybe I'll just be better off if I skip VB.NET, and try C# instead.