I recently read a book written by James Foxall and published by Sams entitled Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2008 in 24 Hours.  I highly recommend this for those who want an introduction to the language, the IDE, and .NET in general.

Likes

The author did a very good job of covering subjects like the very basics of the IDE, creating forms, manipulating controls, what object-oriented means, etc.

The 10,000 Foot Overview, as Foxall calls it, is an easy to understand approach to how the .NET framework fits together and what the main benefits and drawbacks of it is, regardless of the programming language you choose.

The section on automation with Excel and Word was very useful, and so was writing to the registry.

The ClickOnce deployment chapter was the most interesting to me since at my job we "rolled our own" deployment methodology and I've always been curious what Microsoft is pushing as the "easy way" to do it.

Dislikes

Personally I was hoping it would have discussed more about the new enhancements and features in 2008 and go more in-depth into the IDE, but you can only expect so much for a book that could be read in a day.

The author covers functions and subprocedures pretty well but still uses a lot of the older-style functions like CStr(variableName) rather than the more object-oriented approach of variableName.ToString() or even CType(variableName, String) that leverage IntelliSense.  VB/ASP programmers new to .NET might be familiar with functions like CStr() and CBool() but in my opinion, it de-emphasizes the power of .NET, especially for those new to the language.  I also don't remember any mention of DirectCast(), which is a very handy function that I personally use much more often than CType() for several reasons.

The author often returns data in a function using the FunctionName = variableName method rather than just typing Return variableName, which is also what I consider to be an older way of doing it and personally I don't like it.  The return statement stands out in the code a lot more and is easier to remember and more consistent than using the actual function name.

The database chapter was a good intro but I would have liked to see some mention if not a little discussion on remoting to a server not located on the client, which is more common for larger applications.

Overall

This is a great book for beginners.  As someone who is already familiar with VB.NET, I gleaned a bit of new information along with a good review of the basics.