Customer Reviews

ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The authors' expertise in the subject is clear. These guys have been doing this for a long time, and know it inside and out (or at least as well as can be expected at the time of writing). It reads really well, and their added insight is great.

My major issue with the book is that it really should have been titled "ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers Who Are Already Experts in ADO Using SQL"

Basically if you aren't interested in the differences between ADO and ADO.NET, you'll find yourself skipping over quite a few sections. I got the feeling that I was reading stuff like this a lot - "This isn't any different than ADOc (how he refers to COM based ADO) so we'll just skip over that and get to what's different." Or - "Here is a comparison of how these ADO properties map to their ADO.NET equivalents."

In addition, if you are looking for info specific to anything other than SQL server, you may be disappointed. The book just makes minor mention of OLEDB.

If these issues aren't a concern for you, consider this a 5 star rating.

The book is divided into two major sections - the "old" ADO and ADO.NET. Bill covers both of these in great detail. The ADO coverage has been enhanced since the first edition. The ADO.NET stuff blew my mind. I'm new to .NET. I was expecting to learn just ADO.NET. I was happily surprised to learn not only that but also the pitfalls to avoid when coding VB.NET. That was a bonus.

The IMHO sections had much to offer. Too many books just give you the techie stuff. It's nice to get an honest opinion from someone who's "been there". He goes beyond that, too. Throughout the book, there are "Best Practices" icons to point you to the stuff you really need to know.

This book has code - lots of it. Every example is right there on the CD. It doesn't stop there, however. Bill shows you the turns and twists of the Visual Studio .NET IDE, making it an essential reference for any serious coder.

The book is written with the intermediate to advanced reader in mind. Even though I'm more like an experienced newbie, I still got a lot out of it. I'm less intimidated by .NET than I was going in.

Bill Vaughn has done a great job. I'll give up this book when you pry it from my cold dead hands. :-)

I would recommend this book, like other Bill Vaughn (BV) books, after you have been messing around with the technology (ADO.NET) for a little while. That is you should struggle with your own app for a couple of days first then pick up this book. If you are brand new to ADO.NET, and programming against databases in general, I would look elsewhere for an introductory book, but would come back to this book after you feel you have mastered the fundamentals. The feeling you get when reading this book is similar to playing a video game then going back and reading the manual that came with it. "Oh thats what THAT does" is a common feeling that I had. BV does an excellent job of going beyond the documentation, and the book comes with a CD loaded with code, but unless you have a laptop to look at it, say while you are at a conference, it is hard to appreciate the code in its entirety. Where BV thinks it is important to show actual code in the text, there are snippets that fill in the blanks nicely. I also liked the IMHO boxes that appear everywhere. In fact thats the first thing I read in each chapter to give me a flavor of what was in store. The book is primarily written from the point of view of you being the programmer talking to the data source directly and exposing the data source to interested clients. That is you are either the middle tier programmer or the client in a client server world.

My only complaint is that the book spends an amazing amount of time explaining how ADO (ADOc) is alike/different from ADO.NET. This is useful if you are an accomplished ADOc programmer, but utterly useless if you are starting from scratch with ADO.NET. This is, apparently, how BV learns and teaches new stuff. That style was evident when he first started writing about ADO when RDO was on the way out. It is an excellent way to learn new technology if you knew the old technology, but a hindrance if you knew little or nothing about the old subject matter.

Oh and by the way Bill......i will always call close on my SQLConnection objects. I got the message!

Of my 8 books with ADO.NET, this is the one I am using. I needed to know how to manually run through and manipulate rows and columns. I needed to use complex business logic with a database. My work involves more than displaying some simple DataGrid. This book gives the examples for manually code ADO.NET.

If you only do two-tier client/server development, and you want a repetitious, backward-looking overview of ADO.NET written in "Hitchhiker" style...this book is for you.

If you want definitive Best Practices for how to program ADO.NET for n-tier, Windows Forms and Web Services, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Vaughn's first book on ADO, ADO Examples and Best Practices (APress), was the best book on ADO I'd ever read.

Well... guess what. This is the best book on ADO.NET I've ever read!

Vaughn shows you not only *how* you can accomplish something in ADO.NET, but the *best* way to accomplish it as well.

This is a MUST have for any .NET / ASP.NET programmer.

I never thought I'd read a database programming book with coded sex messages. But the catching of SqlException in the examples with a variable name of 'sex' and the ensuing 'sex.Message' has tickled my sense of humor and had me scouring the rest of the code examples for the authors humor. In so doing I've actually been learning and more importantly understanding far more about ADO.NET than I have been able to do with some of the other dryer books on ADO.NET I bought at the same time. Thanks for the amusement Bill and Zebedee.

This book is not intended for data access programming beginners. The book doesn't assume previous knowledge with ADO.NET. However, those who have prior knowledge of ADO.NET would be the primary beneficiaries. Nonetheless, the book assumes knowledge of *classic* ADO in that ADO.NET is frequently compared to it. ADO.NET is a radical departure from *classic* ADO in most respects, but there are many similarities between the two. Extensive knowledge of Transact-SQL is also assumed (but this shouldn't come as a surprise). Some of the book's examples rely upon Visual Studio .NET.

It seems that this book was rushed to the presses. I found some punctuation and grammatical errors in the first edition. I would have given this book 5 stars were it not for these distractions.

This is a "for dummies" book masquerading as a best practices book. It is also a "for people who think Vaughn is as funny as he does" book, as well as a "for people who want to know more about ADO classic than they do about ADO.NET, which would be odd considering the title" book and a "for VB programmers who find C# as confusing as Vaughn does" book.

Waste of money. Vaughn is an inept C# programmer and a lousy writer.

I am not a VB developer but it seems like this book is for VB developers. Authors have no idea of C++/C# programming. It has less ADO.NET but more ADO programming issues. Authors talk a lot but there is no code which makes the book worthless.

Can you live without "finally"? I can't. Author have no idea and never used "finally".