[Also posted on my blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/2008/06/11/book-review-ado-net-3-5-cookbook.aspx]
After several days, I've finally finished reading this book. This is really a very complete book wit lots and lots (and lots!) of examples. It's fair to say that it covers most (if not all) ADO.NET related scenarios (I'm an SQL Server user but if you're into Oracle then it also has several examples that show how to use ADO.NET and Oracle).

I do have one complaint though: chapter 8. Currently, I'll personally "hurt" anyone that is working on the same project as me and that uses ADO.NET objects on window forms or ASP.NET front ents! Ok, I'm not violent, so I wouldn't really hurt anyone :) serioulsy, don't use ADO.NET objects on your UI.

Having said this, I still recommend it (specially if you're working with ADO.NET).

The 'ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook' is a great resource for every .NET database developer out in the world. With 950+ pages of content you will not be reading thin, as this goodies book comes with 222 tidbits of information that will help you in your everyday work.

Subjects covered include:

- connecting to a variety of data sources
- working with disconnected data objects (datasets)
- querying data
- executing functions and stored procedures
- using LINQ
- searching and filtering data
- adding and updating data
- copying/transferring data
- database integrity
- binding data to web forms
- XML data
- optimizing .NET data access
- debugging stored procedures
- doing batch updates
- enumerating SQL servers
- SQL Server CLR integration

I feel that is an outstanding companion book for .NET database developers that are looking for a resource that specifically outlines tasks into a neat, organized manner. Instead of thumbing through a book to figure out a particular way to do something, these common tasks and questions are broken up for ease of use and efficiency. If you are a .NET DB developer you definitely owe it to yourself to add this great book to your collection of technical books immediately.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for a review by a "technical expert". I really liked how the book was laid out with a problem-solution-reasoning approach (known as a recipe). Each one was generally useful for those unaware of how to do things in ADO.NET. The examples were short and too the point. The topics were quite varied so just about everyone will find something in this book. In particular the recipes on getting schema information programmatically will really benefit a lot of people because it is neither common nor easy.

I had only a few complaints about the book. The first complaint is with the title. It says ADO.NET v3.5 but in reality almost all the recipes cover any version of ADO.NET from v2 on. This might cause some people to shy away from the book. This book is really for anybody using ADO.NET.

This leads me to the second complaint. There really was no 3.5 content mentioned. LINQ and SQL 2008 were mentioned a few times but they aren't specific to ADO.NET v3.5. LINQ itself seemed out of place for the topic.

The final complaint I had was that the recipes are mostly designed to be copy and pasted into working code. The code samples don't really follow what I would consider an appropriate pattern for professional code. Therefore simply copy/paste will cause more problems than not. It really would have required no additional lines of code and would not have complicated things to have "done it right". Still this seems to be standard practice for most technical books so I can't harp too much.

Overall I recommend this book for anyone who works with (or will) ADO.NET of any version.

(Full Disclosure: I was a tech reviewer for this book and received a free copy)

I've been using the various incarnations of Microsoft data access technologies for quite some time and have been using ADO.NET for a few years, so I wondered whether I was going to learn anything new from this book. It covers all of the territory to get started (connection strings, basic usage of ADO.NET classes, etc.), but what I really appreciated was that it topics that advanced ADO.NET users would find useful and I certainly learned a few new tricks.

The topic on writing provider and database independent code (Section 10.22) which covers how to do it right if you are targeting .NET 1.1 (which we do) was particularly useful to me. Chapter 10 (Optimizing .NET Data Access) is just generally a good chapter no matter what your level and covers asynchronous SQL calls (executing and cancelling), ASP.NET data caching, paging queries, SQL Server stored procedure debugging and more.

Since my job was to actually run every code snippet, I can vouch for their quality. Most are built off the AdventureWorks sample database that comes with SQL Server Express, so they are ready to run. The rest come with full DDL to create what you need (databases, stored procedures, etc), and the code and SQL is available online so you don't have to type it in.