Instruct: Classify a given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Not good for teaching yourself

This textbook is lousy if you are using it to teach yourself. The book gives snippets of sample code, but it is difficult for the reader to start coding a project using these samples because they are too isolated and they do not build one upon the other to give a sense of continuity. At the end of each chapter a large amount of code is printed. This is the solution, but how the reader gets to that solution can be quite a problem. I doubt if the authors tested the manuscript on potential students, the sycophantic blurb on the back cover notwithstanding.I found a much better book with which to teach myself: "Visual Basic .NET Step by Step", 2nd edition, by Michael Halvorson, Microsoft Press. This book lives up to the "Step by Step" in its name. You cannot get lost following it.