Subject: Book review: Pro ADO.NET with VB.NET 1.1 Author: Theo Moore Date: 5/25/2005 Body: Pro ADO.NET with VB.NET 1.1 I’ve been involved deeply with DB access applications for the last 5 years, and I’ve read many books on the subject. I’ve read some that were bad, and I’ve read some that were amazing. This book is definitely a good one. Note that this not intended to be a full reference on the intricacies of the object model, but more of a “this is what it can do, and here’s a practical example” type reference. Our author does a great job of introducing the subject. This is intended to be book for someone with some experience; it is not a beginner’s book. Mr. Malik writes the book with the perfect voice for his audience. I also found the inclusion of references to prior versions of ADO to be most useful, too. He even provides specific instances when it would be better to use prior (non-.net) versions of ADO since the functionality either doesn’t exist, or works much better. This realistic approach to ADO.Net’s abilities is consistent throughout the book. The book most notably does a great job of “selling” the data reader object in .Net. This is an exciting, very powerful read-only connection that can be used for variety of purposes. Mr. Malik gives many useful examples (e.g., reporting) where this is *much* faster than standard methods. He demonstrates how to use the GetSchemaTable, and how to bind it to a data grid; a very nice way to get this information out of the database. The code examples were very specific and addressed their topics very well; not a lot of fluff that serves little purpose. I find that shorter, more direct code snippets like these are more useful. Ideally, a code example should fit on one page, if at all possible. I felt the chapter on creating your own data provider was interesting, but might have been a bit too advanced for most readers of this particular book. I also thought this was covered a little quickly, since it does only make up one chapter; I suspect an entire book could be written on the subject.  It wasn’t a bad idea to include it, but it was perhaps a bit too much icing on an otherwise very good cake. So, if you are looking for a “down and dirty” intermediate practical usage reference, you need not look much farther than this.   Cancel