Visual Basic Text Books – Are you updating yours?

I last wrote about textbooks for Visual Basic last December. Now that the year is winding down and the VB 2005 books are starting to become available I thought I would ask - what books are you looking at for next year? Are you able to update textbooks for Visual Studio 2005 or are you going to get by with what you had this year? If the later what sort of things would make this easier for you?

I know that a lot of people just can't buy new books as often as the computer industry updates their software. The upgrade from Visual Basic 2003 to 2005 is not all that major. Well if you are a professional developer it probably is but for a very basic programming course it’s probably not much of a big deal. There are things added that you are not going to know about but you may not think of that as a problem. On the other hand some things just might make your life easier. The Class Designer for example might save you and your students a lot of time.

I want to make some time this summer to develop some teaching aids but I’d like to know what is useful. Are video demos useful? Are you looking for explanations of new language features or perhaps some interesting new .NET classes that are written at student reading levels? What am I not thinking about? I can’t do everything but if I can do a few things that make it easier for teachers to use Visual Studio 2005 I’m happy to give it a go. Leave a comment or send me email at AlfredTh (at) Microsoft.com

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2006
  We have a 7 year textbook adoption cycle, but worst yet, we've never even HAD a textbook for our Visual Basic class.
  
  I used Code Rules this year, and loved it, and hope to use it next year.
  
  
  I am so hoping to use some of your videos -- we didn't this time.
  
  I'll take any teaching materials I can get!
• Anonymous
  June 18, 2006
  I am htinking of using "Code RUles" for next year.  Are there any special things I should know...or is everything really self-contained?
• Anonymous
  June 20, 2006
  It's pretty self-contained. I recommend that you download it and make up your own mind though. For a lot of people it is a great start for a course but they need to advance beyond it if the semester is longer or the course is a year long. So some people use it for the first quarter. For an explority course that isn't a full semester it is probably fine by itself.
• Anonymous
  August 28, 2006
  PingBack from http://chaespot.com/teachers/2006/08/28/teacher-text-books-reviews-history-textbooks-and-other-educational-materials-dedicated/
• Anonymous
  August 31, 2006
  PingBack from http://chaespot.com/teachers/2006/08/31/teacher-qualifications-male-teacher-in-room-full-of-text-books/