Coder to Developer by Mike Gunderloy

• The amazing thing about this book is not it's depth but it's breadth. It covers (almost) everything that a self-taught VBA programmer needs to know. It doesn't cover ANY of the topics with great depth and some of them will require further research and reading (and one or two a LOT of reading.) But you get a very thorough overview of every topic and I don't think there is any chapters to add.
• For those things that are not covered in detail he gives lists of books and articles to reference.
• For EVERY subject area he gives a list of TOOLS (Free Open Source to Commercial) that can be used to automate that area of discussion with a brief synopsis of advantages and disadvantages of each.
• The information is contextualized using a real-world software development example referenced throughout the book.
• The book is designed with Microsoft Tools and Technologies in mind. He uses Visual Studio throughout and designs SOLELY for .NET. (All code samples are in C#. However when necessary he reference VB.NET tools and techniques.)
• The book is fully oriented to small development teams rather than large teams. Many of the books that I had purchased previously were strongly oriented to large teams developing really large software projects.
• The book is replete with URLS and references where software code (snippets/samples/patterns/etc) can be downloaded.
• The book basically covers the subject matter in the same order you would actually develop software (from Start to Finish OR Design to Delivery). Of course there is a lot of overlap so this is only GENERALLY true.
• The book is absolutely devoid of idealism. No smarmy insistence that you have to do it this way or that. But rather encourages a "what works for you" attitude in the HOW of doing. For example, you should probably "architect" software that you are delivering to a client but for vertical software maybe a spec alone will do.