Rating: 
Summary: Best ADO Book money can buy.
Review: ...When I have a question about data access this is the book I reach for. It has everything I need in an ADO reference. If you write both VB and VB.Net applications that use ADO or ADO.Net; you have to get this book. It covers how to use, and when to use each object in Classic ADO (the author refers to it as ADOc) and ADO.Net. It also covers how and when to use ADOc in the .Net Framework to accomplish things that were left out of ADO.Net. The author does a very good job in contrasting the DataSet with the DataReader and when you should use one over the other. This book is well written with just the right amount of humor, and covers data access in VB and VB.Net very well. If you are looking for the best ADO(.Net) reference and how to guide, you have found it.tc
Rating:
Summary: Best ADO Book money can buy.
Review: ...When I have a question about data access this is the book I reach for. It has everything I need in an ADO reference. If you write both VB and VB.Net applications that use ADO or ADO.Net; you have to get this book. It covers how to use, and when to use each object in Classic ADO (the author refers to it as ADOc) and ADO.Net. It also covers how and when to use ADOc in the .Net Framework to accomplish things that were left out of ADO.Net. The author does a very good job in contrasting the DataSet with the DataReader and when you should use one over the other. This book is well written with just the right amount of humor, and covers data access in VB and VB.Net very well. If you are looking for the best ADO(.Net) reference and how to guide, you have found it. tc
Rating: 
Summary: Great ADO book, so-so on ADO.Net
Review: As a purchaser of all of Bill Vaughn's Hitchhiker series books, this book was a bit of a disappointment. If you're looking for an ADO book, you can't go wrong. If you're looking for an ADO.Net book, keep looking. More than half the book covers ADO, which is surprising since the title leads with ADO.Net. I had purchased this book because previous BV books were extraordinarily helpful in learning database technologies, and I like his writing style and the callout tips. With ADO.Net, I was hoping for the detail found in previous books, and it's just not there (although I haven't finished the book yet).
Rating:
Summary: A practical and useful guide to ADO .net
Review: Bill's work on data access is well known and has been for some time. But this work really shines - it's useful, practical, even enjoyable reading! Most importantly, it speaks to developers like me with an understanding of what we need to get things done. This is hands down the best of a considerable number of books on ADO .net.
Rating:
Summary: A practical and useful guide to ADO .net
Review: Bill's work on data access is well known and has been for some time. But this work really shines - it's useful, practical, even enjoyable reading! Most importantly, it speaks to developers like me with an understanding of what we need to get things done. This is hands down the best of a considerable number of books on ADO .net.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but lacking important info
Review: First off, the first half of this book talks about working with ADO in VB6, scared me at first but the second half talks about ADO for VB .NET. So, right off the bat 1/2 of this book is most likely useless to you depending on what you use or want. Goes into great detail about gotcha's, speed, interesting methods like using stored procedures and how the dataset is handled and what to watch out for. My problems, he does not mention how to bind a control through code. For example, have a form that has a grid/listbox and when the user clicks on an element have it display more detailed info about that record in labels & textboxes which are bound to the record... won't find it here and that's like basic 101 stuff. Maybe you want a parent child record, with the parent in text boxes and labels, and the child to be a grid (sort of like the tutorial but a little more advanced since it too does not show textboxes/labels). No help here. Also, all his examples appear to be just single-form based. I wanted to know more about how to program connecting to a database across multiple forms. Why, I even wanted to create a single connection object and use it across multiple forms... or have a database application on multiple forms... another basic database example. No help found in the book, after 18 hours I finally crawled my way and found how to do it myself and how darn simple! But, if you don't know where to begin (this book was no help) it's difficult and tedious. Now that I know I'm kicking myself. In the end this book fulfilled me half way. I wanted to know how to program an application across multiple forms that connect to a database, how best to use the same connection object across those forms, and how to bind textboxes/labels through code and how to update, delete, and insert records that way. This book has left me in near utter darkness on how to do that. I wanted to know about parent/child relations and this book had very little to offer as far as I'm concerned in respect to examples (there's one). However I have a complete understanding of how to connect to a datasource, access columns, set up parameters, access stored procedures, and some knowledge of parent/child relations, some gotcha's of using the fill method, how to set filters, and sorts on the returned recordsets, and a good understanding of updating/deleting/inserting and how to intervene with those operations... also foreign constraints so that's why I give it an average rating.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but lacking important info
Review: First off, the first half of this book talks about working with ADO in VB6, scared me at first but the second half talks about ADO for VB .NET. So, right off the bat 1/2 of this book is most likely useless to you depending on what you use or want. Goes into great detail about gotcha's, speed, interesting methods like using stored procedures and how the dataset is handled and what to watch out for. My problems, he does not mention how to bind a control through code. For example, have a form that has a grid/listbox and when the user clicks on an element have it display more detailed info about that record in labels & textboxes which are bound to the record... won't find it here and that's like basic 101 stuff. Maybe you want a parent child record, with the parent in text boxes and labels, and the child to be a grid (sort of like the tutorial but a little more advanced since it too does not show textboxes/labels). No help here. Also, all his examples appear to be just single-form based. I wanted to know more about how to program connecting to a database across multiple forms. Why, I even wanted to create a single connection object and use it across multiple forms... or have a database application on multiple forms... another basic database example. No help found in the book, after 18 hours I finally crawled my way and found how to do it myself and how darn simple! But, if you don't know where to begin (this book was no help) it's difficult and tedious. Now that I know I'm kicking myself. In the end this book fulfilled me half way. I wanted to know how to program an application across multiple forms that connect to a database, how best to use the same connection object across those forms, and how to bind textboxes/labels through code and how to update, delete, and insert records that way. This book has left me in near utter darkness on how to do that. I wanted to know about parent/child relations and this book had very little to offer as far as I'm concerned in respect to examples (there's one). However I have a complete understanding of how to connect to a datasource, access columns, set up parameters, access stored procedures, and some knowledge of parent/child relations, some gotcha's of using the fill method, how to set filters, and sorts on the returned recordsets, and a good understanding of updating/deleting/inserting and how to intervene with those operations... also foreign constraints so that's why I give it an average rating.
Rating: 
Summary: VERY misleading title - really for beginners
Review: Given the "Best Practices" title, I assumed that this book was going to go into much more advanced lessons about real world problems and solutions for ADO.NET
Instead, I found a book filled with beginners guides to the database wizards included in Visual Studio.NET and "first you do this, then you do that" types of examples. The author barely touches on designing N-tier architectures and instead spends most of the time comparing ADO.NET and ADO. A decent book if you are experienced at ADO and are just now learning ADO.NET. Otherwise, stay away.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for VB progammers moving to .NET
Review: I did not read the first half of the book, which covers ADO, but the second half, on ADO.NET is great! The style is easy to follow, the examples make sense and there are almost zero proofreading errors (which makes the book a standout among programming books by itself). The code examples in the text, are minimal, but the CD has the complete code and more. The examples on the CD work (another standout feature). This book is not for a beginning programmer, but it very good for an experienced progammer trying to make the move to ADO>NET, it was the 6th book that I read on the subject and after reading it, I was able to go back to my other books and understand things that had not made sense the first time I read them.
Rating:
Summary: ADO Classic but not ADO.NET
Review: I have been reading Bill Vaughn's books since the first Hitchhikers book (and I still have them all!). I found this book to be excellent in content for ADO Classic. The references and examples were well structured and most of them worked! As always I enjoyed Bill's style and method of getting the correct detail to the reader. I won't judge the content on ADO.NET yet as it is still an emerging technology and I don't understand it fully but will be waiting for next release of Bill's book that covers ADO.NET specifically.
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