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You've chosen to learn Visual Basic (VB), a great language to learn! However, like many languages out there, many different versions of this language are in use. So which should you learn? Had this been a few years ago, I would have a long discussion here; however the advent of Visual Basic 2005 (also known as VB 8.0 by the community) has greatly simplified that decision-making process. Go ahead and learn Visual Basic 2005. It has all the great functionality of the .NET framework with all the nifty things from pre-.NET era of VB. There's no deciding about this, learn Visual Basic 2005!

Visual Basic 2005 has existed long enough to have made its way into mainstream development. Additionally, you can download an "Express Edition" of this environment for free legally from Microsoft. This will give you more than sufficient functionality to learn about the Visual Basic environment and perhaps deploy a few of your own programs. The great thing about Visual Basic 2005 is even though it relies on the .NET 2.0 runtime (an over 30 MB download), the installer created by Visual Basic 2005 for your applications will automatically detect if the user is running .NET 2.0 and skip past that download if they already have it. This substantially reduces the size of your installer. As .NET 2.0 has been out for some time and many applications now rely on it, you will find many computers will already have this framework installed. No need to worry about making your program huge simply because you want to use .NET.

While many may recommend the free route of learning a programming language off message boards, online tutorials and such - I strongly recommend the route of paying for a book and reading that book. Of course, if you're already a college student and you need to fill your course schedule, a class in Visual Basic couldn't hurt. However, I personally find that college-level classes on the subject barely scratch the surface of the language and typically are taught by those more apt in other languages and not fully familiar with the capabilities of VB. Hence, I prefer a book since those typically are written by those who are expert Visual Basic programmers. Additionally, even an intro-level book will take you far beyond what a college course will teach you. Personally, I'd avoid books that make you build programs for the command line (DOS-style) environment. Visual Basic is designed for building graphical Windows programs, be sure your author is teaching you how to do that by quickly

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