*don't wait for me*...
as above, a programmer effectivly just makes programs...
VB.net is really simple to use, and I'm not sure how in depth your class will be,
it's probably the kind of thing that you'll want to play around with more at home that just inthe lab... certainly when I was learning programming I found it very useful to have a copy of the IDE at home so I could make practise programs, and go through lab sessions onece more to make sure I fully grasped them...
Visual Basic is (very very loosly) an Object orientated programming language,
However, it is distinctly different from most object orientated languaes, but that probably doesn't bother you so I'll just explain what I mean...
Visual Basic programs are built around forms.
the form is an object, and it has properties, properties incude things like the title bar text, what title bar buttons are shown, whether there is a frame, if it is resizable, it's height, width colour, etc...
on the form there are other objects.
you may have a button. (buttons also have properties), such as height width the writting on the button, whether the button is visible or hidden etc...
Visual basic makes extensive use of functions,
that is to say that functions are called when actions happen,
this could be a form being loaded, (or closed), the mouse moving, a button being pressed.
when the action happens, (e,g button being pressed) the function relating to that button will be run...
so if you have a form, with a single button (command1) and a blank label (label1) on it, the code might look like the following.
sub_command1_click()
label1.caption = "the buttone was clicked"
end sub
now you can see that when the button is clicked, the caption property of the label object is changed to make it display some text...
now you can make it do a load more than that (obviously -it'd be a fairly crap language if you couldn't).
but I think that pretty much describes Visual basics workings for now...
so far as books go...
you can find help on the microsoft website...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/
but if you havn't started then you don't know what you do or don't need to know... it could be that you looked at what I wrote above and thought that's really simple, or it could be that it confused the hell out of you.
I'd pretty much wait until the course starts... whilst that could mean that you are up against a lot to learn in a shorter time than if you had read up on it before... it pretty much is so simple that I'd be surprised if you couldn't learn it quickly...
I guess that the big question is...
do you have any concepts of programming languages?
and can you think logically... or break down seemgly easy tasks into patterns of flow that could be programming blocks...
if you can thikn logically then there sould be no problem traslating your thoughts into programs.
