If you want info now, don't buy this book. To get anything useful you have to read the whole the whole thing and do all the exercises. I prefer books that have many good clear examples that you can work through and learn from. I don't have time to use this type of book.

Unless you have time to read all 600 pages and follow the instructions on each page, don't bother buying this book. Each chapter relies on what was accomplished in the previous chapter to demostrate a task. You cannot jump in, in the middle of the book and get anything out of it. Don't waste your time and money - there are much better books out there.

Unless you have time to read all 600 pages and follow the instructions on each page, don't bother buying this book. Each chapter relies on what was accomplished in the previous chapter to demostrate a task. You cannot jump in, in the middle of the book and get anything out of it. Don't waste your time and money - there are much better books out there.

This book is exceptional. I have been programming for quite a while, so some of these are old hat, but the presentation is well thought out, easy to follow, quick to learn. Just an exceptional book for this topic.

Not only do you get to use ADO.NET on Access, but SQL Server and/or Oracle, as well as ASP.NET and Web Services. All without breaking into a sweat.

I had a question about one thing and I posted on the Wrox forum for the book. The author himself responded very quickly and we got it straightened out (it was on my end, not the book). I printed out the errata, but there are few errors in the book. Just an all around excellent book.

p.s., oh, yeah, I bought two copies -- one for work and one for home.

Very good book for beginners but the drawback of this book can be summarized in 2 points:

1) ASP.NET 2.0 beta release had been announced and it fly with coding to the next level where you can get rid of 70% your code lines (according to Microsoft !, and this includes database classes and objects which changed dramatically in ASP.NET 2.0 . So, why to learn an old version ;).

2) I rated this book "4" stars, because some of the examples in this book are very long where you get bored before you see your result.

I am a novice Visual Basic programmer. I learned VB6 several years ago while I was still in college, but during the last six years working as a consultant, I haven't done any coding. Then a project came along where I was going to have to begin coding again. So, I looked into the latest version of Visual Basic, which is Visual Basic.Net 2003 or 1.1. What I didn't realize is that VB6 and Visual Basic.Net are not very similar at all. The biggest difference that I found was that VB.Net is truly object oriented while VB6 is not. Anyway, I needed to learn VB.NET quickly in order to develop an application that generated reports for my client. As a result, I also needed to learn ADO.NET in order to work with the database, which stored all of the data.

I bought a ton of books on both VB.NET and ADO.NET and most of them were terrible. The other books that I purchased provided either no coverage on VB.NET and ADO.NET or it contained code examples didn't work correctly when I created them. The biggest reason that most of the code samples didn't work correctly was because a lot of the books on these subjects, especially ADO.NET were written using the first release of this development tool, which was Visual Studio.NET 2002 or 1.0. Therefore, I found that I kept buying books trying to find something that would provide me with an introduction to VB.NET with a significant emphasis on ADO.NET.

Finally, I came across this book. While I am only about half way through it, I can honestly say that it's the best book I've found so far. Now, as I said initially, I would consider myself a novice VB.NET programmer, so I did need a book that would allow me to refresh my programming skills as well as introduce me to database programming with ADO.NET, since I had no experience with ADO, DAO, etc. This book is great because while it is geared toward newbies, it's not overly simple. The examples are all real world scenarios that you would use if you were in my current predicament. If you have no VB experience whatsoever, then you may want to choose a simpler book that focuses solely on VB. But, if you have some experience with VB6 and need to learn VB.NET and ADO.NET, this is an excellent starting point. The best part about this book is that it was written in 2004, which made me believe that the author used this in conjunction with VB.NET and ADO.NET 1.1 and so far, everything has worked perfectly. So, if you're in a similar situation, then please take my advice and buy this book first rather than spend hundreds of dollars on other books that won't help you at all.