Customer Reviews

ADO.NET Programmer's Reference

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(2)
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Many reference books are little more than laundry lists of methods, namespaces, etc. This book does an excellent job of explaining what it covers. It has many good code examples that follow its explanations. For anyone who already has gone through an introductory book on ASP.NET, and who has any background in classic ASP, this book should be a welcome addition. It goes into detail on many additional topics that you don't find in many introductory .NET books, for example Transactional processing. Most books give cursory glances at transactional processing and data relations. This book dives into these topics. For serious programmers who want to get beyond the basics of ADO.NET programming, this book is worth the money, and the time that you will spend on it. This is the best book, at the moment, on ADO.NET programming, either as a reference or as a tutorial.

Wrox lists this book as a "Programmer's Reference". In a reference I look for detailed information and code samples demonstrating usage all of which should be more extensive than what can be found in the help files or online API. This book succeeds very well as a reference providing a great deal of information that you will want to have nearby while you are coding. The book starts off with a description of ADO.NET which I found to be the weakest part of the book. This section doesn't quite put all the pieces of ADO.NET together in a meaningful way. The remainder of the book is excellent. Each of the key ADO.NET classes (DataSet, DataReader, DataAdapter, etc.) and their constructors, properties, methods and events are discussed in detail with code samples in both VB.NET and C#. Each key class or concept (data relationships, transactions, XML mapping, etc.) is given a chapter in the book. The explanations are much more useful that what you will find in the online help files. Besides covering SQL and OLE, the book also covers the ODBC classes which are not documented in the help files included with VS.NET. In a reference the index is important and here the index is good although some entries seem to be off a page or two. If you are looking for an in-depth introduction to using ADO.NET you will want to look at other books. If you need a detailed reference book then this should be your first stop.

As a reference book, I can say its excellent, it gives very good examples of nearly every method and property for the subject, of course it needs experience with ADO, its not for new developers need to learn ADO.NET , also it doesn't teach general preferred or strategic ways of doing things, it's a REFERENCE like the book name reflects, and its an excellent reference in one book.

Bassam

This book is the single most valuable book I bought from WROX in terms of being able to borrow ADO.net code for my application.

ADO.net is the most undocumented are of .net and this book offers hundreds of code samples. The COM Interopability chapter is very good and introduces he obcure Recordset fill and how to use ADOMD from .net!

The Transaction chapter is way too small and incomplete. Another flaw is the fact that the book is supposed to cover VB.net and C# but they were sloppy and it is not a 50/50 split. Often they forget the VB.net samples. You would think their editors could count and make sure all examples come in pairs.

I think it is a great buy but I hope they get all VB.net examples in 2nd edition and a re-orgnization to be more task oriented.

I have never read a book that is so full of errors. Especially the sections dealing with DataAdapter and DataTable. It seems that the authur tried to write on the topics that he did not really understand.

But on the other hand, a book that deals a key technical topic like ADO only but deeply is more valuable than others that deal everthing but only on the surface.

If you are a critical reader that usually do not trust everything written, this book could be helpful for you.

I'm normally a big fan of the Wrox books. They generally do an excellent job of selecting authors and editors. This book, however, was a huge disappointment for me.

Others have said, "It's full of samples." While this is true, many of the samples are for very obvious functionality, whereas very fundamental and complex functionality ends up getting minimal treatment (an example is the Fill() methods for the Data Adapter). While there's more written explanation of the Fill() methods, it is sorely inadequate and the samples are very basic. I would expect much more coverage and probably even an appendix at the end to cover it in more depth.

For the most part, I find the book no more useful than the SDK documentation and samples that you get for free. For a book with 10 authors, I'd expect a lot more insight and knowledge to be passed on and sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Even for the "Reference" books Wrox does, they normally do a much better job of passing along great insight from the authors. If you need treeware docs for ADO.NET, then I guess this book will do but personally, I'm sticking with the online documentation.

This book has lots of typos, and many of the variables are incorrectly capitalized as if someone did a reckless search and replace during the editing process. Also, the code examples follow C++ idioms that aren't suitable for C# programming (for example, declaring variables far in advance of their actual use).

This book was ok and makes an ok reference. Some areas are covered really well, but it always seemed like when I really needed more details that this book didn't provide them.

In addition, there were many many typographical errors such as misspellings, and almost every entry in the index is off by at least a page or two (no joke).