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.

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.

The next third analyses the classes themselves but can be seen as a help rehash (altho' this is a little harsh since it does go into more detail than the standard help).

And the last third lays out the namespaces themselves and shows the classes within them, tabulating their members without further comment. Not useful.

In the end, I still didn't feel confident enough to develop even a simple application (except with the data grid, as in many samples). Why would I want to merge two data sets, and why do I get duplicates in the data set but not the underlying data base? What exactly happens when I Update, or EndEdit()? When I do a Fill() on a dataset, am I really sucking the entire data into memory?! Is this efficient, what is Best Practice on this?

ADO.NET puts a large, complex, flexible abstraction between the developer and the database itself, and what is needed is someone to show the "correct" way to use all these bits in real-world programs.

The book is concise and too the point.. It's not a definitive reference to ADO.NET (If you haven't bought David Sceppa's book or Bill Vaughn's --- buy those two and this one!) but it's a very practical how to guide for a lot of common tasks. If you are familiar with Matt's stuff, it's very typical of his style. I think he's one of the more interesting writers out there and this book keeps your attention. I'm an ADO.NET nut, so I'm highly opininated on such literature, but this book really lived up to my expectations.

Basically, if you are looking for a concise and very 'to the point' book on ADO.NET, particularly if you have a decent understanding of the technology, you'll be glad you bought this book. I have bought and loved every title MacDonald has written, and this book is a great example of why.

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.