Your hands-on, step-by-step guide to learning Visual Basic 2010.Teach yourself the essential tools and techniques for Visual Basic 2010-one step at a time. No matter what your skill level, you'll find the practical guidance and examples you need to start building professional applications for Windows and the Web.Discover how to:Work in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Development Environment (IDE)Master essential techniques-from managing d...

Was the Renaissance just a period of extraordinary art and architecture?The Renaissance: All That Matters examines the major developments of the Renaissance era from its beginnings in Italian city/states to later cultural, political, and scientific achievements in France, Spain, England, and Germany. By examining original sources and introducing readers to new research and important debates, this accessible book provides an exciting introduction to the Renaissance age.This ...

Practical Database Programming with Visual Basic.NETThe most up-to-date Visual Basic.NET programming textbook—covering both fundamentals and advanced-level programming techniques—complete with examples and solutionsVisual Basic.NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer programming language that can be viewed as an evolution of the classic Visual Basic (VB), which is implemented on the .NET Framework. Microsoft currently supplies two major impleme...

From Robert Hughes, one of the greatest art and cultural critics of our time, comes a sprawling, comprehensive, and deeply personal history of Rome—as city, as empire, and, crucially, as an origin of Western art and civilization, two subjects about which Hughes has spent his life writing and thinking.Starting on a personal note, Hughes takes us to the Rome he first encountered as a hungry twenty-one-year-old fresh from Australia in 1959. From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us...

An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeurThomas Madden’s majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and its people, tracing an arc from the city’s humble origins as a lagoon refuge to its apex as a vast maritime empire and Renaissance epicenter to i...

This is the life of one of the most revolutionary artists in history, told through the story of six of his greatest masterpieces: “The one indispensable guide for encountering Michelangelo on his home turf” (The Dallas Morning News).Michelangelo stands alone as a master of painting, sculpture, and architecture, a man who reinvented the practice of art itself. Throughout his long career he clashed with patrons by insisting that he had no master but his own ...

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarde...

"S ome of the most fascinating, intriguing and, yes, brutal episodes of the region's past written in the fast-paced, involving style of an adventure novel" ( Italy Magazine, "Book of the Week").With the perfect fusion of history, art, architecture, superb natural beauty, and weather—not to mention magnificent traditions of food and drink—Tuscany has cast its spell over visitors for centuries. What is it t...

New York Times bestselling author Ross King's biography Machiavelli is "a convincing portrait of one of the most misunderstood thinkers of all time."*The author of The Prince—his controversial handbook on power, which is one of the most influential books ever written—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was no prince himself. Born to an established middle-class family, Machiavelli worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence a...

Vitruvian Man is the world's most famous drawing, by one of the world's most famous artists. The image - named after a Roman architect and engineer, Vitruvius - has become visual shorthand for artistic genius and scientific inquiry, and yet nobody knows anything about it. In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester examines the forces that converged in 1490 to turn an idea that had been around for centuries into this iconic image, bringing the ghost of an unknown Leonar...

A vividly colorful portrait of one of the greatest and most fascinating figures of the Renaissance, Lorenzo de' Medici, focusing on his role as a brilliant—sometimes ruthless—statesman who was responsible for the artistic flowering of Florence, the city where the Renaissance first blossomed.Lorenzo de' Medici—a leading statesman, the uncrowned ruler of Florence during its golden age, a true Renaissance man known to history as Il Magnifico (the Magnificent)...

One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici. On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood