Books by Tim Patrick

Humorous Headlines from Obama's First Year in Office

2009 was a colorful year like no other with its shift of national economies into record red ink, the rise of America’s first black president, and the drooling passion for ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned 3D aliens. It’s no wonder that headlines like these were ignored by reputable news organizations:

• Tea Party protests in Washington get ugly as milk and lemon factions turn on each other.
• Post Office to change its name to "United States Netflix Delivery Service."
• Oil rises to $78 per barrel on fears that oil may rise to $80 per barrel.

Stuffed with over 500 essential and frivolous headlines, Break the News to Me Gently will make everyone else in the unemployment line wonder what’s so funny.

Build .NET 3.5 Applications with Microsoft's Popular RAD Tool for Business

If you want to learn Visual Basic, and plan on using it to develop anything beyond a ten-line sample, this is the book for you. Programming Visual Basic 2008 walks you through the majaor features of Visual Basic 2008, including new features like LINQ and lambda expressions. While taking that walk, you'll build an entire business-quality database application chapter-by-chapter.

"I have never reviewed a book I enjoyed as much as this one. Excellent coverage, perfect for the intended audience. Concise, clear, accurate descriptions. This is a winner."
-Ken Getz; MCW Technologies, LLC

Master VB 2005 by Building a Complete, Production-Quality Application from Start-to-Finish!

This book is the fastest, best way for experienced programmers to truly master real-world Visual Basic 2005 development. You won’t just learn syntax and features: you’ll build a complete, robust, data-driven application. You’ll put Visual Basic 2005 to work in solving real business problems, overcoming the practical challenges of building production systems, and you will learn to see Visual Basic 2005 projects as they were intended--as complete, cohesive solutions. Patrick’s engaging style and crystal-clear explanations will help you stay focused, learn fast, and apply what you’ve learned.

• Master every stage of the application lifecycle and every step in the development process
• Walk through all facets of database design and ADO.NET data access
• Create advanced Windows applications with Windows Forms and Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0
• Make the most of classes, inheritance, and other object-oriented Visual Basic 2005 features
• Effectively utilize assemblies, data types, error processing, XML, GDI+, and many other language and platform features
• Learn how to personalize and restrict your application’s features based on user preferences
• License, localize, document, deploy, and support your application

Start-to-Finish Visual Basic 2005 is the perfect tutorial for existing Visual Basic programmers moving to Visual Basic 2005, programmers moving from other traditional procedural languages, and experienced Visual Basic .NET/2005 programmers who want to deepen their skills in developing entire projects.

This book will help you solve more than 300 of the most common and not-so-common tasks that working Visual Basic 2005 programmers face every day. If you're a seasoned .NET developer, beginning Visual Basic programmer, or a developer seeking a simple and clear migration path from VB6 to Visual Basic 2005, the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook delivers a practical collection of problem-solving recipes for a broad range of Visual Basic programming tasks.

The concise solutions and examples in the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook range from simple tasks to the more complex, organized by the types of problems you need to solve. Nearly every recipe contains a complete, documented code sample showing you how to solve the specific problem, as well as a discussion of how the underlying technology works and that outlines alternatives, limitations, and other considerations. As with all O'Reilly Cookbooks, each recipe helps you quickly understand a problem, learn how to solve it, and anticipate potential tradeoffs or ramifications.

Reviewed by: About.com

Let's say that you're a new Visual Basic programmer, or a pre-.NET VB developer who'se ready to make the plunge into .NET, or a long-time .NET coder who can't remember the arguments to the InStr function. Maybe you've been dreaming about a book that will introduce you to the esentials of Visual Basic programming, or perhaps you need a good reference work on that same language. Well, if you are any of these people, or all of them, have I got the right book for you: Visual Basic 2005 in a Nutshell.

Visual Basic 2005 is a major update to the language and its underlying .NET Framework. So I thought, why not do a major update to the best book on the topic. And that's what I did. The fully updated and reorganized third edition of Visual Basic 2005 in a Nutshell includes a brief yet thorough introduction to the Visual Basic language and .NET, the system that makes it powerful yet simple. The majority of the book consists of reference chapters, covering every major Visual Basic language keyword and feature, plus a completely reference to the new My hierarchy.

Of course the book has a full set of useful appendices. Of course the book provides the level of detail and quality you expect from O'Reilly Media books. Of course it has a catfish on the cover. But don't just buy it for that. Buy it for all the coding joy it will bring to you and your loved ones.

The Visual Basic .NET Style Guide helps you bring clarity to your programming development and source code. Programmers use standards (such as XML) to help them implement professional applications. But have you ever looked at their source code? Arrrgh! When you program, especially as part of a team, you must work within a set of standards that guide your development. The Visual Basic .NET Style Guide provides these standards, and also emphasizes the underlying attitudes that drive the standards: discipline, planning, and ethics.

The Visual Basic .NET Style Guide is a fully-updated version of The Visual Basic Style Guide (described below). It is useful with all versions of Visual Basic .NET, and includes several fully-rewritten chapters based on input from readers and developers.

Reviewed by: About.com

The Visual Basic Style Guide is the original software development standards guide geared specifically at Visual Basic, its source code, and related development practices. Like its successor, The Visual Basic .NET Style Guide (described above), this book focuses on standards and design principles that help individual programmers and development teams bring clarity to projects.

The Visual Basic Style Guide is specifically written for use with Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier projects. For .NET projects, use the updated Visual Basic .NET Style Guide.