We have finally gone ahead at work and purchased Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional. To kick start learning VB.NET 2005 I have purchased the following 3 books from Amazon:
I have to be honest and say that my first choice would have been to purchase Murach's books as I am a big fan of theirs but I found a few of issues when trying to order their books.
The first issue was that when I tried to order from Murach's web site I could not find out how to get the delivery costs before ordering the books.
The second issue was that when I tried to order Murach’s VB.NET Database Programming with ADO.NET from Amazon it appeared that by looking at the table of contents and checking the publication date - 1 May 2003 - that only the 2003 version was available.
The final issue was that delivery on the books seemed unlikely to occur within less than a couple of weeks.
As I wanted to get the books within a week I decided that I'd go with the Microsoft Press books as they were easier to order and could be delivered within a few days. I also wanted most of the books to be by the same publishing house as I find this makes moving between the books easier as the writing and content style tend to be similar. Time will tell whether this decision proves right or not.
Further subjects I possibly need books on are:
- VB.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 development.
- VB.NET 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 programming.
- VB.NET 2005 and Microsoft Office 2003 Programming.
- Reporting using Visual Studio 2005.