Books : Visual Basic 2005: The Complete Reference (Complete Reference Series)

Rating: - The VB book for people who don't need the book
After thirty-five years or so in software development, including a stint with a software company as a Java web developer, I thought this would be a good volume to get me up to speed on the latest version of VB. If you already know everything that's in the book, go ahead and buy it. But if you need to learn anything from it, forget it. The author assumes you already know what you're reading about before you read it. For instance, he begins talking about Classes without explaining what a Class is. And when he does get around to defining "Class", he uses the term itself in the definition. So if you didn't already know what a Class is, you would never figure it out from his definition. Obviously, I already knew what a class is from having programmed in other Object Oriented languages. This is just one really obvious and glaring example. Having gotten up to page 22 I'm going to set this book aside and go find one that explains what I want to know in plain english.

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Rating: - An Exhaustive Reference
This is an exhaustive and well put-together reference for VB 2005 programmers. It's not a step-by-step manual, nor a book of sample code. It's all about documenting the features, classes, operators, and syntax of the VB 2005 language.

I'm a huge fan of McGraw Hill's Complete Reference Series, and used my ASP.NET Complete Reference (for 1.0) until recently when I started migrating to 2.0. At 850+ pages this is a tome to sit on your bookshelf until .NET 3.0 hits the scene.