ADO.NET in a Nutshell [With CDROM]

I own over 50 books on .NET including several on ADO.NET. This book is my favorite on ADO.NET. Thus, it is the one I use most often. It has a great blend of discussion, documentation, and code samples. It is much easier and more thorough than much of the MSDN documentation or most other books. I've yet to run into a situation where the answer I need isn't either in this book or gives me a great starting point to find that answer. Virtually every ADO.NET oriented class, method, event, and property is covered. This book is definitely worth purchasing.

I've owned this book for 3 days and cannot put it down! I have not been a big fan of O'Reilly over the years, but this book is "incredible". It goes into the detail that most books seem to omit and it's those details that we "developers" desperately need. I would recommend this book to ANY and ALL .NET developers who are writing code that hits against a database. There are topics covered in this book that Microsoft's own MSDN and VS.NET help system seem to fail at properly explaining. It's because of this that I've found myself (all too often) going to codeguru.com and google groups to get answers to ADO.NET questions that this book actually covers.My hat goes off to authors Matthew MacDonald and Bill Hamilton on a job well done.Coming from a Visual Basic background and now working in VB.NET and C#.NET, this book should satisfy both the VB.NET and C# developer.

This book is classic O'Reilly. It's separated into three sections. The first being a thorough but brief introduction to all aspects of the API. The second section is an API reference. And the third a quick reference. This third section is included on the CD that comes with the book and will integrate into Visual Studio.Don't expect the first section of the book, which is an introduction to ADO.NET to give you a gentle introduction to the subject. That's not the Nutshell form. If you don't know ADO at all you will want to buy both this book and an introductory book. If you know related APIs, or you know ADO.NET and you need a refresher or have weak spots you will find some new things in the first section. For me it was the support for disconnect access and also the integration with the XML features of SQL Server 2000.Although this book stays true to the Nutshell form it is a little longer in the introduction than the usual. The introductory section is seventeen chapters and is almost half of the length of the book. So if you are an intermediate or advanced engineer I think you could probably learn enough ADO directly from this book without any other introductory book.

This nutshell book is a strong addition to the line. If you've had the opportunity to use these books before, then you'll be in a good position to take advantage of what this one can offer. Although this book was written as both an introduction as well as a reference, I found that it was much more beneficial to use it when encountering specific situations. The authors take time to ensure that there are examples for every topic and I found that the add-in provided in the CD was invaluable...

I have always been a fan of the O'Reilly Nutshell series, and this book lives up to the tradition of its predecessors. However, this book actually goes one step further: all the content in the book is provided on an accompanying CD, which integrates an electronic version of the book directly into Visual Studio .NET. This means that (like the regular MSDN documentation), the O'Reilly documentation becomes a part of your context-sensitive help. Now that's pretty cool! The book is current with the 1.1 version of the Framework, which is a big deal, since there were some pretty significant changes to XML in this release (which is integral to ADO.NET). Like all the other Nutshell books, this one begins out with a quick introduction to all of the more popular classes in ADO.NET through explanation and examples of use. I personally enjoyed the section on DataTables, as there is a lot of discussion on things I don't normally do in conjunction with DataTables, like computing aggregate calculations and merging data sets.Even though this is an ADO.NET book, the authors realize that you can't talk about just ADO.NET, you really need some discussion on implementing the data in a GUI (like using a DataGrid). The authors actually spend some time discussing various issues in data binding and various methods for retrieving and displaying data via this mechanism.Finally, there is considerable discussion (for a Nutshell book) on the relationship between a DataSet and XML. This discussion also includes the basics of using an XSLT to transform XML.