Customer Reviews

Essential LINQ

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well, I'd have to say stuff the Entity Framework. Those of us who have spent many years watching Microsoft change its data access APIs more frequently than many people change their underpants are hardly likely to instantly jump as soon as Microsoft announces that the API they are currently using is now so last week.

The fact that this book has excellent coverage of Linq to SQL is all in its favour, in my opinion. However, the book also has a very clear explanation of the basic concepts, is the first book on Linq that I have seen which clearly explains why we have query expressions as well as query methods, and has excellent Linq to XML coverage if you absolutely can't avoid using the filthy bloated abomination that is XML.

All in all, a most excellent book, a pleasure to read, and highly recommended.

I found Essential LINQ to be an excellent book to learn LINQ from. It was extremely easy to read, accurate, and useful. I liked that the authors took the time to explain and teach the underlying technologies. As a result, they have made LINQ approachable, even for someone with minimal experience beyond basic C# and .NET Framework knowledge. After reading this book, I felt very confident in using LINQ, and I embarked on a project which made use of it. It turns out that I did indeed learn a lot from the book, as I rarely needed to refer back to it or check the documentation. In addition, I was finding myself using many of the other concepts taught in the book, even in places that LINQ did not require them.

Some people (including another reviewer here) may say that too much time was spent on LINQ to SQL or not enough was devoted to LINQ to Entities. Honestly, I've looked at Entity Framework, and it is way too heavy for many projects. Microsoft may be pushing EF, but it won't get used in many places due to complexity, so I still see LINQ to SQL having a role to play in the future. A little more space for LINQ to Entities would have been good though. I also would have liked to see some LINQ "recipes" instead of some of the details at the end of the book.

Overall, though, this is a great book to learn LINQ from. If you are an established LINQ expert, you may want to pass on it, but if you learned LINQ "on the fly" and didn't really learn how it works or the underlying ideas, this is a bood book for you too.

J.Ja

This is a very good introductory text to LINQ.
What I especially liked was that authors dedicated some time to nomenclature, which many other books simply omit. After establishing a solid foundation, the authors provide a digestible balance of depth and pragmatism. This is actually the third book I've read on LINQ, and wish it had been the first. While some of the other books go into technical minutiae, and may serve as comprehensive references, I think this book does a better job at explaining what LINQ is, how it works (to sufficient but not excruciating depth), and how to use it for the common business cases most of us are likely to encounter.

If you're about to learn LINQ, or have questions about some of the basics, consider reading this book.

This book was very good. It was easy to understand yet gave a large amount of details and explanations. My only wish is that they would have spent more time talking about best practices for using LINQ in an n-tier ASP.NET environment.

Charlie and Dinesh boil LINQ down to its essense; everything you need to know about LINQ without fluff. The progression of information is excellent, building in a carefully crafted sequence from the basic to the complex. Expect the "light bulb" to turn on many times while you're reading this.

The quality of this book is very high in technical content and style of writing. I believe Charlie and Dinesh did an excellent job in telling the story of LINQ, why it was needed and how to use it efficiently. This book should be on every .NET developer's desk. Thank you Charlie for making yet another excellent book! The LINQ to SQL chapters are great, so as the XML ones as well.

Unless you're absolutely new to LINQ, this is not the book you're looking for. It spends undeserved space explaining LINQ to SQL, a technology already deemed as obsolete by the own Microsoft. And there's practically no content on the Entity Framework, which right now seems the path recommended by Microsoft.

On the other hand, you'll find a lot of "funny" details, as a six page table listing key bindings in Visual Studio 2008... that is, a very cheap trick for making a longer book.

I've been doing LINQ for about a year now and this book was really good to give me new ideas, and by showing different approaches to the same solution to learn different types of syntax.
I specifically liked the more advanced chapters because they helped me advanced in my LINQ knowledge. The examples are carefully shown and clear that make everything so simple and easy to understand even when defining the concept may be a bit hard for the person with hardly any LINQ knowledge.
This book is really good because it has great information and one of the greatest technologies made by Microsoft in the last few years. LINQ is great and if you are learning about it this is a great book that will get you started and point out all the strengths and solutions in an elegant manner.

Linq is an interesting new capability added to C#, according to the book. It extends the ability of C# and .NET to access data. Eventually, other languages supported by .NET can be expected to have Linq.

The problem is the impedance mismatch between any object oriented language and a relational database. In Java, Hibernate addresses this issue. Linq is the C# analog. But Linq goes further in some ways, by letting queries to XML data and to sets of C# classes be written in the same manner as for querying SQL. This unified notation can ease the programmer's job. Though perhaps it should be said, since the book doesn't seem to do so, that the impedance mismatch between OO and XML or a set of classes within the OO language is fairly minimal. Reading in XML from a file gives data that is [often] inherently a set of objects. While if you have a set of object classes within an OO language, then surely there is no mismatch. Which is why these haven't been big issues within java or C++. Granted, the unified notation of Linq is still handy to support all 3 cases.

The practical reality is that most data is stored in SQL, and the book devotes 4 chapters to explaining Linq to SQL. If you are going to use Linq, it's these chapters you need.

Another advantage of Linq is in the declarative nature of the queries. At least in spirit this mimics SQL. More to the point, it frees up some of the burden from the programmer, by reducing the amount of imperative code she has to write. Which also reduces the chances of bugs in that code.