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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Certainly worth the purchase price... however, October 26, 2010
This review is from: Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework (Paperback)
First - go ahead and get this book. Second - Please let me refine an important point straight away. I would have liked Amazon to provide multiple categories for rating this book and many other books.
Perhaps this chart will help to clarify:
Reference Value = *****
Quick Start Value =**
Organization=***.5
Depth=*****
My priority is Quick Start, hence the 3 star rating. Your mileage may vary.
Background
Like Juval's WCF book, this EF book begins with well-organized introductory material, but later chapters contain a jumble of practical application techniques, deep dives into implementation details, anecdotes, and copious detail. By the time I reached the mid-point of the book, I was buried in detail without a practical understanding of how to approach the immediate modeling problem at hand. I am just now shifting my attention over to the APress EF recipes book to reset my learning effort. I plan on interleaving my study of these two EF books from this point forward. For example, while I start to run through a bunch of the hands-on material in the APress recipes book, I'll fast forward to later chapters of the Lerman book for material on N-Tier, MVC, and POCO.
What would be the best approach? Sanderson's MVC sets the benchmark as it is a perfect example of successive embellish. Success embellish begins with entry level material and builds one core concept upon another. Key material is methodically revealed from top to bottom and the final result is a solid understanding which enables application developers to tackle real-world problems. But it gets even better. The second half of the MVC book is a quasi-reference section that carves out each building block introduced in the first part of the book for detailed examination. I say quasi as MVC reference material is both detailed and practical.
So how could the EF book be improved? For my immediate quick start purposes, it would have been quite helpful if the EF material had been organized using the successive embellishment/reference section two-part model.
In summary, this book is a must have and is destined to become a trusty, dogged-eared volume on many prairie dog shelves. Best wishes on happy coding and natural light shining brightly on your p-dog cubicle.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Definitive Work on Microsoft's Entity Framework Version 4, November 10, 2010
This review is from: Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework (Paperback)
Prior to reading this book, I was not completely sold on Microsoft's Entity Framework. Version 1 of EF fell far short of other ORM methods such as LINQ to SQL in a number of areas, not the least of which was ease of use and overall querying capability. With the release of .NET 4.0 and the accompanying release of Entity Framework version 4, I (wrongfully) assumed that the pain points of EF in its first incarnation would continue to be so. I work with very complex financial data models and have yet to come across an ORM/RDMS that did what I needed out of the box so to speak. It was not until I took up reading Julie's book - "Programming Entity Framework 2nd Edition" that my eyes were opened.
Through a masterfully crafted text, one of the current data coding masters of .NET has laid out, from beginning to end, a way to realize those complex data models as usable objects to be programmed against. Even at just over 900 pages, you will find NONE of the typical "filler" tech garbage seen in many computer books today where they parrot information readily available freely from other sources just to increase page count. Within each chapter can be found numerous "ah ha!" moments wherein a conceptual theory actually becomes a practical application, usable in daily coding. This is how all computer books should be written - with actual complex, real world examples.
Microsoft has designated EF as their primary ORM for use with SQL Server and SQL Azure going forward which warrants its adoption and use by all RDMS data centric .NET developers. Entity Framework in its latest release becomes a powerhouse of data persistence and functionality, yet it remains rather hard to grasp from a development standpoint even with the massive convention over configuration initiative brilliantly implemented under the sheets. There is simply no way to master a technology until you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, and this is where Julie comes in. Julie makes it so easy as to be construed as simple (which it isn't.)
Thank you Microsoft and Julie Lerman!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great All-Around Starter for All EF-Related Technologies, May 8, 2011
This review is from: Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework (Paperback)
It would be nice if there were multiple reviews available. If you're looking for an expert guide to every nut and bolt of the Entity Framework (EF) - I'm not sure this is the book.
If you're looking for a quickstart, I think this is a decent book. But, anybody can draw a model without a book. The challenge is DOING something with that model, and that takes a little more than a 1 page MSDN tutorial.
The challenge is that if you're going to talk about EF, there are hundreds of semi-directly related topics. LINQ, Entity Queries, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, MVC. There is no way any book could cover everything you can do with EF.
However, this book covers all the core topics very well. As someone relatively new to LINQ, WCF, and MVC, it was great. As someone who is familiar with databinding, but never really used it (because it's been mostly awful), it was nice to get into it.
So, 5 stars might be a little high, but this book did everything I wanted:
1. It gave enough detail to help me start reasonably quick.
2. It covered all the related technologies with enough depth that I don't have to buy a LINQ book, WPF book, etc, just to use EF.
So, if you're newer to the 2010 technologies, I think this is a great place to start.
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