Essential LINQ (Paperback)

~ Charlie Calvert (Author), Dinesh Kulkarni (Author) "WELCOME To ESSENTIAL LINQ..." (more)
Key Phrases: tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, reading objects, Visual Studio, Miles Davis, John Coltrane (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

“Charlie and Dinesh bring important skills to this project that enable them to show how LINQ works and the practical ways you can use it in your daily development process.”

From the Foreword by Anders Hejlsberg

 

LINQ is one of Microsoft’s most exciting, powerful new development technologies. Essential LINQ is the first LINQ book written by leading members of Microsoft’s LINQ and C# teams. Writing for architects, developers, and development managers, these Microsoft insiders share their intimate understanding of LINQ, revealing new patterns and best practices for getting the most out of it.

 

Calvert and Kulkarni begin by clearly explaining how LINQ resolves the long-time “impedance mismatch” between object-oriented code and relational databases. Next, they show how LINQ integrates querying into C# as a “first-class citizen.” Using realistic code examples, they show how LINQ provides a strongly typed, IntelliSense-aware technology for working with data from any source, including SQL databases, XML files, and generic data structures.

 

Calvert and Kulkarni carefully explain LINQ’s transformative, composable, and declarative capabilities. By fully illuminating these three concepts, the authors allow developers to discover LINQ’s full power. In addition to covering core concepts and hands-on LINQ development in C# with LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities, they also present advanced topics and new LINQ implementations developed by the LINQ community. This book

 

•           Explains the entire lifecycle of a LINQ project: design, development, debugging, and much more

•           Teaches LINQ from both a practical and theoretical perspective

•           Leverages C# language features that simplify LINQ development

•           Offers developers powerful LINQ query expressions to perform virtually any data-related task

•           Teaches how to query SQL databases for objects and how to modify those objects

•           Demonstrates effective use stored procedures and database functions with LINQ

•           Shows how to add business logic that reflects the specific requirements of your organization

•           Teaches developers to create, query, and transform XML data with LINQ

•           Shows how to transform object, relational, and XML data between each other

•           Offers best patterns and practices for writing robust, easy-to-maintain LINQ code

 

 

 

About the Author

Charlie Calvert, Community Program Manager for the Microsoft C# team, currently focuses his technical energies on LINQ. He has periodically worked with LINQ Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg both during the development of Delphi and during the development of LINQ. Calvert’s ten technical books have sold more than 100,000 copies. They include Delphi 4 Unleashed, C++Builder 3 Unleashed, Delphi 2 Unleashed, Teach Yourself Windows 95 Programming in 21 Days, and Teach Yourself Windows Programming.

 

Dinesh Kulkarni is a Senior Program Manager on Microsoft’s .NET Framework team. He was the Program Manager in charge of LINQ to SQL. He was deeply involved in LINQ’s planning and implementation from the incubation stage and was lead author for MSDN’s authoritative LINQ to SQL paper. Before joining Microsoft, he worked in diverse technical roles ranging from architecting and implementing front-end CASE tools for IBM to designing databases and middleware for a Wall Street hedge fund.

 

 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (March 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321564162
• ISBN-13: 978-0321564160
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #202,985 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book to learn LINQ (and a few other things) from, July 31, 2009

By	Justin M. James "J.Ja" (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good Introductory Text, May 6, 2009

By	John P. Puopolo "jpuopolo" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book to start getting pumped with LINQ, July 13, 2009

By	Oscar Azmitia (Moreno Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.