O'Reilly have produced a number of titles in their useful Cookbook series. Aimed at programmers who need quick solutions to common problems, they present a series of problems and code listings that offer possible solutions. This time around it's the turn of Visual Basic 2005.

First out, it's best to say what this book isn't. It is most certainly not a book to teach you how to program or how to use Visual Basic 2005. If that is your goal, look elsewhere.

The Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook consists of several sections, each devoted to a particular category such as Arrays and Collections, Strings or Databases. Within these sections are a number of common and less common programming problems that are presented in a problem/solution/discussion format.

Product	Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook
From	www.oreilly.com
	Broad range of well chosen problems/solutions
	Some 'filler' problems

In general the examples are pretty well chosen and cover a wide range of tasks. Naturally everyone has different needs and whilst for this author, the many maths based ones were off little interest, the string based ones were. For anyone who started with VB.Net and thought 'Huh?' when first starting to work with strings, the numerous code snippets will be very welcome.

We did feel that some of problems presented were more examples of how to use the basic functionality of Visual Basic 2005 and really didn't warrant being in a book of this nature. A notable example of such a problem being 'You want to create an instance of a class'. However, in the main we felt the content was well chosen.

All in all, the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook presents some 300 'recipes'. Whilst no CD-ROM is included, the code can be downloaded. Handy for any programmers coming from a VB6 background are the examples which are used to illustrate VB6 techniques that break under Visual Basic 2005 such as sharing event handling across multiple elements of a form.

The majority of recipes are in the one to one and a half pages range with a few stretching to three pages or so. They're all self contained though so there is no need to cross reference back and forth trying to put together a working chunk of code - everything you need is (almost always) there in the recipe you look up.

The vast majority of the recipes are illustrated where relevant with output examples presented as screen shots of dialog boxes. Many of the graphics ones have several screen shots to show exactly what is going on - almost essential in those cases.

One thing that many will find useful is the highlighting of features that you may not have considered even using in your programs such as cryptography or using stored procs for your database access chores rather than embedded SQL.

Overall this is a fine book that covers the bases and provides clear, concise nuggets that every Visual Basic programmer will benefit from. The problem/solution/discussion format works well and the wide range of topics means the book is suitable for all skill levels from beginner to expert. Everyone will find something of interest in the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook.