Sams Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 24 Hours (Paperback)

by Jason Lefebvre (Author), Paul Bertucci (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

ADO.NET is the data access model built into the .NET Framework. It replaces the old (and largely successful) ADO used in almost all Visual Basic and ASP applications built over the last few years. ADO.NET enables an application to communicate with any OLE database source (including Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft Access, and even text files). This book will present ADO.NET in a simple, easy -to-learn manner filled with many code examples and exercises. A reader with no previous knowledge of ADO.NET should be able to read this book and have a functional knowledge of new object model allowing them to retrieve and work with data from multiple data sources.

From the Back Cover

ADO.NET is the data access model built into the .NET Framework. It replaces the old (and largely successful) ADO used in almost all Visual Basic and ASP applications built over the last few years. ADO.NET enables an application to communicate with any OLE database source (including Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft Access, and even text files). This book will present ADO.NET in a simple, easy -to-learn manner filled with many code examples and exercises. A reader with no previous knowledge of ADO.NET should be able to read this book and have a functional knowledge of new object model allowing them to retrieve and work with data from multiple data sources.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Sams (May 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672323834
• ISBN-13: 978-0672323836
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,298,239 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Sams Teach Yourself Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing , frustrating and sloppy, January 26, 2008

By	maddog (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

I worked about half way through this book and then gave up.

While I will say the choice of examples seems good, the explanations are inadequate or missing. I did the entire chapter on sqlAdapters and could not understand what they are for. I opened up another book which explained simply that the point of an adapter is to encapsulate four sql commands, select, delete,insert & update. Oh yeah! Of course!

The examples are shoddy - many typos. Sometimes the C# code is not presented in the text. The book says its available in the downloadable content. Not always. C# is the stepchild in this book.

The examples use a wide variety of editing tools when it could have stuck with just one such as Visual Studio. I really dont need to master all these tools at the same time as I am trying to digest ADO basics.

I am an experienced C# programmer yet I wasted several hours trying to get one of the examples to work. I gave up at that point.

If you know enough not to get snagged on the errors in this book then you dont need the book. If you are a beginner in ADO, you will get very frustrated. Why pay money for that?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It matches my expectation, May 2, 2005

By	Burbank Steve (Burbank, CA) - See all my reviews

I was a little apprehensive after reading the review here. So I actually went to a local bookstore (try it, it's fun!) to flip through the pages to see for myself before buying it online.

I think it's a case of setting the right expectations. It's not a "ADO.NET Bible" nor a 2000-page reference, so don't expect that type of detail from this book. However, this is for someone using Visual Studio .Net for the second time, right after having mastered sample VS tutorials and ready to try out DB connectivities for the first time.

I have used DB's before, but just learning Visual Studio (C#) for the first time. So I am from a different path than most other indended readers. I found the DB sections to be very accurate and easy to follow. That gave me the confidence that the other sections would be on par. The rest of the sections provided a logical next step to Microsoft's own tutorial, especially on the area of connection pooling and what performance traps there are for people with little or no DB background.

Even though it's 400 pages, it makes a very clean/quick read on the interactions between front-end code and DB.

I would recommend reading this book after going through Visual Studio's tutorial. Don't get me wrong, you would still need a reference (on-line or book form), but this book does a good job of easing you into the completely different world of DB interactions.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very shallow, buggy code samples, has questions/exercises, December 2, 2003

By	Scott Hodson (South Orange County, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I recommended this book to some programmers I was teaching .NET to. I liked that it contained questions and exercises, much like a text book, so they could do those on their own.

However, the sample code that we downloaded from the publisher's web site would not even compile most of the time! And most of the code samples are in ASP.NET, which they were not yet familiar with, and the into to ASP.NET and the instructions to getting IIS set up was incorrect and confusing.

As for subject matter, this book is a very superficial overview of ADO.NET, but I guess what do you expect in 24 hours.

The most redeeming quality was that it included exercises and questions at the back of each chapter which allowed me to not have to spend hours writing those myself so for that purpose I found it useful.