This guide is strikingly different from other books on Microsoft ADO.NET. Rather than load you down with theory, the new edition of
ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook gives you more than 200 coding solutions and best practices for real problems you're likely to face with this technology using Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 platform.
Organized to help you find the topic and specific recipe you need quickly and easily, this book is more than just a handy compilation of cut-and-paste C# code.
ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook also offers clear explanations of how and why each code solution works, and warns you of potential pitfalls so you can learn to adapt the book's problem-solving techniques to different situations.
This collection of timesaving recipes covers vital topics including:
- Connecting to data
- Retrieving and managing data
- Transforming and analyzing data
- Modifying data
- Binding data to .NET user interfaces
- Optimizing .NET data access
- Enumerating and maintaining database objects
- Maintaining database integrity
Ideal for ADO.NET programmers at all levels, from the relatively inexperienced to the most sophisticated, this new edition covers the significant 3.5 upgrade, including new programming tools such as LINQ.
ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook offers a painless way for those of you who prefer to learn by doing when it comes to expanding your skills and productivity.
Customer Reviews & Comments
I received a copy of this book from the publisher for a review by a "technical expert". I really liked how the book was laid out with a problem-solution-reasoning approach (known as a recipe). Each one was generally useful for those unaware of how to do things in ADO.NET. The examples were short and too the point. The topics were quite varied so just about everyone will find something in this book. In particular the recipes on getting schema information programmatically will really benefit a lot of people because it is neither common nor easy.
I had only a few complaints about the book. The first complaint is with the title. It says ADO.NET v3.5 but in reality almost all the recipes cover any version of ADO.NET from v2 on. This might cause some people to shy away from the book. This book is really for anybody using ADO.NET.
This leads me to the second complaint. There really was no 3.5 content mentioned. LINQ and SQL 2008 were mentioned a few times but they aren't specific to ADO.NET v3.5. LINQ itself seemed out of place for the topic.
The final complaint I had was that the recipes are mostly designed to be copy and pasted into working code. The code samples don't really follow what I would consider an appropriate pattern for professional code. Therefore simply copy/paste will cause more problems than not. It really would have required no additional lines of code and would not have complicated things to have "done it right". Still this seems to be standard practice for most technical books so I can't harp too much.
Overall I recommend this book for anyone who works with (or will) ADO.NET of any version.
