The author stated in the book's introduction that his intention was "to create a book that...cuts through the fluff and teaches you what you need to know."

He attained his goal.

Starting with the first hour and continuing on through Hour 24, the book takes you on a step-by-step journey through the world of Visual Basic.NET and the art of creating a working application. In fact, at the end of Hour One, you will have created a complete, functioning, VB.NET application.

Topics covered in this book range from debugging techniques to application deployment with stops along the way to introduce the beginning programmer to arrays, loops and use of various controls available with this product. Also included are many other necessary components inherent in the development platform. Additionally, at the end of each Hour, there is a Q+A section, a Workshop Quiz, and some exercises to help you build and test your recently acquired knowledge.

While each chapter/hour should be studied until the covered topic is fully understood, three hours stand out in particular. They are hours 16, 21 and 22.

Hour 16 is all about objects and classes. These two fundamental concepts are integral in the world of .NET development and are a large source of confusion for many new programmers. The language used is straight forward with an intentional lack of programming buzz words. The examples given, though basic, will leave the reader with a foundation upon which to build the skills necessary in order to fully utilize both of these essential aspects of .NET programming.

Hour 21 covers a topic near and dear to my heart -- database programming -- and provides an introduction to ADO.NET. Although the examples provided use MS Access as the backend database, the underlying principles also apply to advanced database technologies like MS SQL Server.

Hour 22 exposes the reader to automating Office applications such as Word and Excel through VB.NET. There are two sample projects. The first one covers automating Excel and the second covers the topic of Word automation. All of the code examples worked as advertised.

In the introduction, the author states "All too often, authors fall into the trap of focusing on the technology rather than on the practical application of the technology."

Truer words have seldom been written.

While the reader will not finish this book and be armed with the skills necessary to step into the marketplace or an industry as a Senior Applications Developer, the reader will be armed with the skills necessary to take the next step in attaining that goal.