I realize, from scanning threads about books, that this is inviting a lot of sarcasm and humor, but so be it:

With the help of some books (IDG, and others) I had gotten myself somewhat comfortable with casual programming in VB 5.0 / 6.0 (though only my 5.0 compiler worked properly). I made a couple of handy aps, such as a timecard calculator for a friend who worked in payroll and was driven nuts by math related to fractional hours, or a "flat-file" database (very generic). My pride and joy was a text editor for raw HTML that would insert a template, and featured buttons to insert frequently used code segments, such as images, tables, double breaks, etc. (even four customizable buttons!).

Well, somewhere between the last application that I wrote and now, the HDD that contained VB 5.0 crashed hard. So I found VB.NET 2005 for a reasonable price, and here I am.

Some things are very intuitive, and the IDE makes useful suggestions most of the time, but at least two things that were easy in VB Classic are mind-blowing in VB.NET: Printing and Databases.

I'd like to write an ap that uses an excel spreadsheet for a database back end, and I've got a training-system ap I'd like to write that requires printing a progress report at the end. I've tried reading other people's snippets and trying to make sense of dataset datagrid datasource ... Yeah, it's making my brain hurt. I've declared the hell out of things and tried to make ADO.OBDC or ADO.OleDB work, but it's making me say bad words and drink coffee.

So I'm thinking that I need a book that specifically addresses how to take what used to be easy in Classic and explains how it works in VB.NET.

Yes, I did read threads here on databases. Even cut and pasted a bit. Still confused. Got a Wrox book on VB.NET 2005 (by a guy with lots of teeth). Talked about a lot of stuff, but all the code examples failed miserably (the error codes came up "What Language are you writing?"). Baffled as I ever was.

Any suggestions for a book that makes Printing and Databases under VB.Net vaguely comprehensible?