Note: There is something odd about Amazon's processing of technical reviews. People goofing off, or what? I submitted this a couple of days ago and it never appeared - perhaps this will be the lucky time. The only other time this happened was also with a computer-related review. Anyway, here goes....
I haven't read every page of this 560-page book, but I've seen enough to make me want to give a really strong recommendation. If you are working with VB.Net at all, you probably need this book.
I say it's much better than its title, because to me, and I suspect to others, "Power Tools" suggests a bunch of handy add-ons - neat tricks, perhaps some useful utilities. That's not what this book is. It is a really thorough and well-written explanation of a host of absolutely key, fundamental topics in VB.Net.
For instance, it's got the best, most concise description of public and private key security, and RSA encryption, with clear, straightfoward "how-to's," that I've ever seen. Also, the best and clearest description of middle-tier technology options, with comparisons betwen Web Services and .Net remoting, plus a good summary of COM+ and how to use existing COM+ components in .Net.
Other chapters cover a wide range of topics - queuing, XML, regular expressions, ADO.Net, Reflection, deployment, and more...Whatever the topic that is currently interesting or challenging you, you'll probably find it here.
In the Introduction, the reflections on Microsoft's clarity, or lack thereof, in documentation are often right to the point! And the whole issue of having a productivity language rewritten by exponents of a low-level, nitty-gritty approach is well covered. The two approaches to programming are very different, and in adding VB to the .Net family, much was gained but also quite a lot was lost that could have been kept - at the price, admittedly, of making VB able to do things that C# couldn't do! Don't tell me they couldn't have found a way to make things like user-defined types of arbitrary size, with fixed-length strings, and control arrays, translate into IL - they just didn't want to. The Power Tools authors don't use the term "language snobbery" but it comes inescapably to mind.
The new VB9 tries to make a few gestures in the direction of ease of use, such as inferred type definition, but they miss the point and in fact may just open the door to errors. Old VB6 hands aren't looking for the ability to write loose or sloppy code - they just want a more flexible tool, one where the compiler does more work to save the programmer's time, so we can get a working product out the door more quickly, That's always what VB was about, and Microsoft somewhat lost sight of that. Oh well...