The cat's out of the bag...

Oh, and yeah, my book is finally available! I've actually got a real, printed copy of it sitting here on my desk and Amazon claims that they're shipping it within 24 hours! (It may not be on the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble for a little while longer, though.)

Overall, I have to admit that I find this kind of frightening, somewhat akin to what it must be like taking your child off to their first day at school. Here's something that's been a part of you for quite some time, and now it's out there at the mercy of the big, bad world. Will it make friends? Will it get beaten up and come home crying? I guess now only time is going to tell....

So, everyone, go out and buy a copy and tell me (and everyone else on Amazon) how wonderful it is! Here's a handy link to help you get started:

Hope you all like it....

P.S. - There's already someone selling a used copy of the book on Amazon. I've had my own copy something like 48 hours... how does that happen?

Feedback

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Congratulations, Paul! You must be feeling as if you climbed up Mt. Everest. Is this your first book? 3/5/2004 4:54 PM | vbNullString

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Hm, maybe someone's selling one of the uncorrected proof copies they sent out for review...I wonder how much I could get for the one sitting here? :) And here's the review I ran in the Developer Central newsletter this week: THE VISUAL BASIC .NET PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, by Paul Vick (Addison-Wesley): In many circles VB .NET doesn't get much respect - that, despite the fact that Basic is the most popular programming language in the world. This book probably won't change that, but it does provide a comprehensive reference to VB .NET from the guy who wrote the spec. Vick starts out with the simple parts of the language and moves all the way through to the trickier parts of the object-oriented code that will be new to many VB developers. Along the way, there are notes of tricky points and recommendations for writing code that fits well with the rest of VB .NET. If you've been looking for a language reference to help answer your questions about jagged arrays, shadowing vs. overloading, and so on: this is it. [VB .NET 2003] 3/5/2004 6:23 PM | Mike Gunderloy

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Congratulations! are you ready for the Whidbey release? :-) 3/6/2004 4:43 AM | Corrado Cavalli

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

... ordered ... 3/6/2004 3:34 PM | Cory Smith

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Thanks for all the nice comments! Yes, this is my first book and, assuming all goes well, I should start on updating it for Whidbey in the not-too-distant future... (Long lead times and all that.) 3/7/2004 10:10 AM | Paul Vick

# Paul Vick's book is here! (by yag)

3/7/2004 11:43 AM | VS DATA Team's WebLog

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

I too have written several books, and the deal with the "used" section on Amazon.com is that there are hundreds of independent book sellers who sell books at a deeper discount than Amazon. So a used book on Amazon is often a new book sold from an independent book seller. It does not mean someone has already bought your book and decided they didn't like it!!! And to the commentor who mention about the "proof copies", these days proofs are sent around as PDF files, which means it isn't possible to sell them in the traditional way. The real risk is that proof copies could show up on P2P file sharing services like Kazaa... 3/8/2004 9:19 AM | Scott Duffy

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Bill Gates read the book I see....I am impressed ;-) Just got my copy today. Looking forward to reading it. 3/10/2004 10:19 AM | Greg

# re: The cat's out of the bag...

Interesting book... I hope it could be available also here in Italy. Good work... 3/18/2004 6:08 AM | Stefano Demiliani

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