| VB.NET: A Laboratory Course teaches the reader how to program in Visual Basic from an object-oriented viewpoint, which is important becuase of the object-oriented flavor of VB.NET. The emphasis of this book is not on the fancy users interface tricks you can perform with VB.NET, but on the fundamentals of writing correct and efficient VB programs. The book provides a number of example programs that illustrate the concepts developed in the text, and the exercises at the end of each chapter help to reinforce the expository material from the chapter. Visual Basic is arguably the most popular computer programming language for application development in the United States and around the world today. Visual Basic is also an excellent language to teach as a "first" computer language because of its easy-to-learn syntax and flexibility. This book treats Visual Basic as a serious programming language and not as just another Windows application. One concern that is frequently voiced when discussing the differences between Visual Basic and C+++ is the level of object- oriented programming supported by Visual Basic. With the upcoming release of VB.net, the language will support all the major features of object- oriented programming- encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.
Teaches the reader how to program in Visual Basic from an object-oriented viewpoint, which is important because of the object-oriented flavor of VB.NET.
Visual Basic is arguably the most popular commercial programming language in use worldwide today. Depending on which source you read, there are from 2 million to 4 million programmers currently using some version of Visual Basic. Due to this popularity, Visual Basic is the language taught in introductory computer science and computer information systems courses in many colleges and universities.
Even though Visual Basic has a reputation as an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use programming language, the newest version of the language, Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET), has many features that were not part of the language before. VB .NET is much more object-oriented than its previous versions, and many functions that were built into the old VB versions are now part of the .NET Framework class library. These libraries include classes for input/output, string processing, array processing, data structures, database programming, and Internet programming, just to mention some of the Framework classes. All of these features make VB .NET a much more daunting language to learn than the older versions. With this added complexity comes the need for a more supportive educational environment that allows students to understand the syntax and semantics of each programming construct as they go along. Closed laboratory activities are an ideal way to make this happen. |
