Students begin by getting comfortable with the free Visual Basic Express 2012 IDE and basic VB syntax. Next, they build their skills one step at a time, mastering control structures, classes, objects, methods, variables, arrays, and the core techniques of object-oriented programming. With this strong foundation in place, the Deitels introduce more sophisticated techniques, including inheritance, polymorphism, exception handling, strings, GUI's, data structures, generics, and collections. Throughout, the authors show developers how to make the most of Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools. A series of appendices provide essential programming reference material on various topics.