Customer Reviews

LINQ Quickly

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Before reading this book, I had read a few blogs and tutorials on LINQ, enough to realize I needed to better understand the technology. The book seemed ideal: short, assumed you knew XML, C#, etc and had plenty of example code. (and was one of the less expensive books on the subject).

Unfortunately it seems to have been put together hurriedly. Much of the example code doesn't work as published, some of the code is sloppy (variables initialized but never used), and the actual output of the code doesn't match what the text says it should be.

Fortunately, the text itself is clear and gives you enough of a sense of what is going on that you can, with some effort, get the examples going.

I've been reading another book from Packt Publishing, called "LINQ Quickly". Again, it's a pretty short book, coming in at 250 pages. The author does a decent job at explaining the basis of LINQ and the various implementations, such as LINQ to SQL, and so on. What would have been a welcome addition to this book is a more practical approach to the technology. Perhaps by building a real application along the way. There is an appendix for just that, but it's a disappointing 7 pages. The book's subtitle mentions it being a practical guide but I didn't see that.

If you want a brief overview of what's possible with LINQ and the various implementations, you'll probably find the same information for free across the web. I was hoping for more of a real-world introduction.

The book provides a good overview of LINQ and it's supporting language features, such as anonymous types, implicit typing, object initializers, extension methods, and expressions. It then builds on that introduction to cover the various LINQ implementations, such as LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to SQL. A very thorough look at the different Standard Query Operators closes the book.

Also provided are two simple examples that really help highlight the power and flexibility of LINQ. The first example shows how to create a web site that uses LINQ to populate a data grid and some form elements. The other example shows how to use LINQ against the Outlook object model to retrieve the details of an Outlook contact.

One thing that this book mentions very clearly that hasn't been talked about much is that LINQ to SQL is able to make use of not just embedded SQL but also stored procedures and walks the reader through the steps necessary in order to make effective use of LINQ and stored procedures.

While the style of writing in the book was a little hard to follow, the technical content of the book appeared to be both accurate and thorough, taking the most in-depth look at LINQ to XML and then the Standard Query operators.

Although adequate for introductory material, this is not a book that I would likely recommend to someone else to read to get up to speed on LINQ when compared to other LINQ books available. I understand the difficulty in making technical documentation fun to read, but the book reads a bit like a technical manual that comes with your computer. Although it may be superficial to state, Kumar tries to lighten it up by using "Icecream" objects throughout the book; the attempt comes off as a bit hokey, like an old cliche, when compared to the mood of the remainder of the book. Although he gets his instructions across, I must say that they're often difficult to infer exactly what he's trying to say. I found myself having to reread many paragraphs over again to fully understand the instruction that he was attempting to convey.

As the previous review stated, the last chapter, which gives a concise and complete reference of every LINQ operator, makes the purchase worth having on your shelf and is a chapter I will surely be references a number of times in the future.

Chapter 1 starts off with an brief introduction to LINQ, the rest of the chapter goes into detail of the new .NET 3.5 framework features created to enable LINQ. The next few chapters cover LINQ to ... Objects, XML, SQL, and XSD. Chapter 6 describes how to use LINQ within you ADO.NET DataSets.

Chapter 7, which is worth the purchase price of the book covers all of the new Operators that are available to LINQ queries. This makes the book worthy of purchasing a desktop reference guide for those just getting up to speed on LINQ.


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