I'm wondering if this board is still being used/monitored
Yup, I'm still watching. It's not a very active board, but if you have questions feel free to post them here and I'll answer if I can.
and/or if this book is out of date, and whether I might be better off with another (updated) book. Thanks.
Visual Basic hasn't changed much since this book was written and the few changes have been to the most advanced language features so they aren't covered in this kind of beginner's book anyway. I'd say you should be safe using this book.
(To give you can idea of how little has changed in Visual Studio, I write almost all of my C# examples using Visual Studio 2008. Code written in VS 2008 still works in VS 2015 and there isn't a lot that has been introduced since then that I really need for most examples. The same holds for
VB, too.)