Beginning C# 2005 Databases

If you read my other reviews you know I don't give five stars to books I've read, but I do here only because as of right now (October 2007), and using the Visual Studio 2005 with ADO.NET 2.0, this is the only book that will give you a step-by-step How To walkthrough on all aspects of SQL Server. It also has a chapter on ASP.NET. As for now, it's indespensible for me, learning this topic. A couple of years from now it might be trash, but that's the nature of computer books. I'm about 1/3rd of the way through the book and no serious errors have been found, just a few things you can fix or figure out yourself. The downloadable code works for the above environment.

I was looking for a begining to start database programming in C# and VS2005 and I took my chances with this book. I have to admit that it really helped me alot to get started, here are the points I found useful: 1. You will definitely learn about ADO.NET basics and concepts and differences between adapters, datasets, tables and other classes. 2. The book shows step by step instructions on how to get apply what you are learning 3. The books gives theory, applications and hints so that all your questions are answered in each chapter 4. Comes with a real life scenario database "FolksTale" that you will learn how to program. The tales are nice by the way! :) To get started you need some knowledge in SQL and basic C#/Windows forms skills. The downside of this book is that some chapters talk alot about Web applications and how to use them with databases. Although this can be a plus, but if have no Web programming experience you might feel frustrated and obliged to skip two chapters. I highly recommend this book!

C# (Pronounced C Sharp) is Microsoft's version of C++ that has modified and extended to fit into it's .NET 2.0 operating environment. One of the major advancements in C# is in its ability to interact with databases. It uses SQL to do the actual database manipulation. I rank this book as intermediate in nature. As a prerequisite I recommend two other subjects for the beginner. One would be on SQL, and particularly T-SQL, the particular dialect spoken by Microsoft SQL Server. And second a book on programming C# in Visual Studio. This is an integrated development environment that has a lot of features that will be of help in writing C# programs. While this book does have a section called 'A SQL Primer,' it is just that, a primer. There are a lot of situations where a task can be programmed either in C# or SQL. An example would be to extract some data from the database and depending on its value extract nothing else, or go get some additional data. This will work faster if it is done in SQL rather than C#. The SQL IF statement isn't covered in this book. The strength of this book is in tying together C# and SQL especially when combined with ASP.NET applications to produce dynamic web pages. At that, it is excellent.