Customer Reviews

Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I enjoyed reading V2 of this book.

The author delivers the content with a hands-on approach that keeps you interested. There is also the occasional nugget of detailed information at just the right time along the way to provide context, without deluging the reader. If you're coming from V1, there are numerous references and comparison to help you sort out the differences.

The table of contents are logically ordered, and if you compare to the previous version, there are a few changes. The size of most chapters is just right, typically 20-30 pages, which enables you to read it in one sitting and go through some of the code samples.

It also helps that Julia is pretty much the authority on EF, and is a very good writer.

This is probably one of THE best technical books I've come across in recent years. It compares very favorably to the old UNIX/Internet related books O'Reilly started out with that were known for covering a subject both broadly and deeply. This has been my one and only reference for working with the Entity Framework and its answered pretty much every question I've had. It even has good coverage of under-the-hood and low level features which most books gloss over or skip entirely. I'm a software architect who has built ORM systems from scratch, Microsoft's Entity Framework is far from perfect but this book is about as good as one could possibly expect.

If you want to learn this topic, look no further this is really your best bet and believe me I did look at other books. She covers everything in a clear yet in depth manner. There is a lot of stuff there so perhaps the second half of the book will be used mostly for reference purposes. All in all a great learning and reference book. You really have to appreciate all the effort she has put into writing this book and I think the final product is superb.

This 2nd Edition has been the best book on Entity Framework (EF) so far.

The book starts out in detail what EF is all about. Chapter 1 details what the technology is all about. It also gives overviews of technologies related to EF. I appreciated how the author updated this version and retracted what he called pain points from the 1st version of the book.

Chapters 2 - 8 go into detail about how to use EF. You learn what Entity Models are and how to query them. The author then teaches you how to leverage LINQ, specifically LINQ to Entities, to query the model. Next you learn about Entity SQL and how to query using it. As the book progresses you learn in Chapter 6 how to manage entity states and keep track of them. You learn about saving, inserting and deleting entities. In Chapter 7 the author show you how to use stored procedures with your Entity Model. By Chapter 8 you are implementing what the author calls "a More Real-World Model." He show you how to separate your EDM from your project so that it is more manageable.

In Chapter 9 you learn about data binding with Windows Forms and WPF Applications. Since I am not currently using these technologies I skipped on over to Chapter 11. In Chapter 11, the author shows you how to customize your entities using partial classes and partial methods. He also teaches you how to modify the code generation templates.

Chapter 13 does into creating and using POCO Entities.

Chapters 22 and 23 are a must read. Author shows you how to handle exceptions and how to plan for concurrency problems.

Finally in Chapter 27 you get to build two layered web applications using Web Forms and MVC.

Overall this book is a must have book that every developer should have in their library.

I highly recommend this book to programmers both basic and advanced who uses the Entity Framework.

This book can be used as a learning book for someone who wants to learn about EF afresh or as a reference book for an advanced programmer. Even if you think you know everything to know about EF - you still want to read this book as it puts a better perspective on things you thought you know.

The book starts with the basic of EF and explains the difference between database schema and business schema and how the normalized tables of a database done by the database administrator may not be the same as your domain objects - and how EF helps you to fix that gap.

The book explains the Entity data model and the 2 way of querying it namely : LINQ to Entities and SQL Entity ( similar to T-SQL ). The later chapter covers both querying methods in detail. It also covers how to use the Stored Procedures with the EDM, data binding with Windows Forms and WPF application, EF object services like keep track of changes and relationship between objects, customizing entities, etc.

In short the author does a good job of covering all the topics related to EF in a nice way. Highly recommended.

I go through many books every month looking for that special book that will be my "goto" resource for any particular task/technology. Rarely am I as pleased as I am with this book. It reminds me of the Petzold book "Programming Windows", and the Prosise book "Programing Windows With MFC". Those two books were always within reach for me (many years ago). Programming EF has earned that same trust with me. Every topic is clearly laid out and accompanied by examples that strike a perfect balance between too much and too little. I have a couple other EF books as well, both from APress. They don't really stack up. They seem rushed and a little bit too much like regurgitated manuals. Sorry APress. The fact of the matter is I don't think I've ever seen a bad book from O'Reilly, or Manning.

Honestly, I bought two copies. One for the office, and one for home.

I have been using the PDF pre-release version of the second edition of this book for several months, and I have been very pleased with it. Good introductory material in the front--I used it to get my feet wet in EF4. Reference material is very good, and it should take you about as far as you need to go for enterprise development with EF4. It looks like Microsoft finally got it right with this version of Entity Framework, or at least close enough to right to make EF4 quite usable. I can recommend this book without hesitation.