ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) [Paperback]

Bill Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2008 | Series: Cookbooks (O'Reilly)

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bill Hamilton is a technology and management consultant who specializes in assessing business objectives and company processes and designing and restructuring technology strategy and enterprise architecture. Bill has been designing and implementing enterprise solutions using both SQL Server and Oracle for over a decade. Bill is the author of other O'Reilly titles including the highly praised Programming SQL Server 2005 and ADO.NET Cookbook, and he also writes for the Microsoft Developer Network. You can email Bill at [e-mail].

Product Details

• Paperback: 992 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Second Edition edition (April 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596101406
• ISBN-13: 978-0596101404
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from a "professional" reviewer, May 31, 2008

By 

Michael Taylor "C# MVP" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from a tech reviewer, April 14, 2008

By 

Louis Franco (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

(Full Disclosure: I was a tech reviewer for this book and received a free copy)

I've been using the various incarnations of Microsoft data access technologies for quite some time and have been using ADO.NET for a few years, so I wondered whether I was going to learn anything new from this book. It covers all of the territory to get started (connection strings, basic usage of ADO.NET classes, etc.), but what I really appreciated was that it topics that advanced ADO.NET users would find useful and I certainly learned a few new tricks.

The topic on writing provider and database independent code (Section 10.22) which covers how to do it right if you are targeting .NET 1.1 (which we do) was particularly useful to me. Chapter 10 (Optimizing .NET Data Access) is just generally a good chapter no matter what your level and covers asynchronous SQL calls (executing and cancelling), ASP.NET data caching, paging queries, SQL Server stored procedure debugging and more.

Since my job was to actually run every code snippet, I can vouch for their quality. Most are built off the AdventureWorks sample database that comes with SQL Server Express, so they are ready to run. The rest come with full DDL to create what you need (databases, stored procedures, etc), and the code and SQL is available online so you don't have to type it in.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a comprehensive source for ADO.NET, May 7, 2009

By 

X. Nihilo "JavaKrakerToa" (Oklahoma City) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) (Paperback)

Just make sure you know what you're getting with this book, and don't expect that it will be the be-all-to-all. If you're new to ADO.NET, you need something more basic. I would also get a plain vanilla reference manual, as it will be difficult to pick out basic structures from this book. It does show many ways to do things, but you have to know what you're looking for, and don't expect exhaustive explanations for what you find or a comprehensive index, either. You need other sources for that. But if you already knew the information from the basic sources, you might not need this book. It seems to be saying, "Look what all you can do with this," but it doesn't give you the basics. Again, if you knew the basics, you could probably write the book.