This post's title is a little provocation (I'm also a VB.NET developer and
having a piece of paper under my hands is always useful) but this is what comes
out from a response that Chris
Sells gives me after a question I've asked him about his last book
"Windows Forms 2.0 Programming (2nd Edition)".
My question was: Why not having also a VB.NET version of this book,
exactly as the 1st version?
Chris answer: "As far as the VB version, nobody bought the 1st edition of
the VB version, so the publisher's not interested in doing one again. Honestly,
that reaction from VB programmers surprised me, but the same thing happened with
Fritz Onion's ASP.NET 2.0 book."
This is a surprise: really the VB.NET version was not a success? This is not
the first case I see, but seems that VB.NET versions of these technical books
are not bought a lot, at least not as their C# counterpart.
VB.NET Developers don't want to read technical books but they love to use
online resources like MSDN or Search engines? I can't think so... I agree that
online resources are the quickest way to retrieve the informations you need at a
certain time to solve a problem, but books are the best way to understand
concepts, they're the building blocks of your technical culture, an unvaluable
resource to improve your skills.
Regarding the question VB.NET vs C# books, my idea is that two separate books
could be an enormous work that can't be well payed by the final business (a
version could be a success and the other not, but the work to write the 2
versions is quite the same at the end).
What I'd like to see (for all these types of technical books) is a unique
book with code samples on both languages where the differences to solve a
problem are a lot. This could be extremely interesting and useful for all
programmers, despite the language chosen. This is the right philosophy to help
grow the .NET skills I think.
However, there's a final consideration to do: no matters what's the language
chosen by the book's author, what really counts is to understand the concepts
and a book is an unvaluable resource. I recommend to read technical books and
not only online resources: having a piece of paper under your hands is always a
pleasure. 