ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Buy It
Review: Like all of Bill's work, this book kicks butt. If you do anything more than lightweigth ADO.NET programming, make sure you add this to your library

Rating:
Summary: Buy It
Review: Like all of Bill's work, this book kicks butt. If you do anything more than lightweigth ADO.NET programming, make sure you add this to your library

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good, missing a very important feature IMHO
Review: The first half of the book is old technology (VB6), I was nervous when I ripped it open and began reading the first couple chapters... then I saw the second half is about ADO .NET or database programming for VB .NET (phew!). So, depending on what you're using 1/2 of the book will be useless for you. I happen to be going from VB6 to VB .NET. He explains through great detail and with surgical precision what things are, how to connect to stored procedures, all sorts but it's all based on datasets. For example, like most people my program has multiple forms. This book was useless on helping me re-use a connection. I began programming each form needing to open a connection when necessary each and every time. I figured out myself (after about 18 hours) how to use a connection from another form and had to scoff at how easy... but it's one of those things that takes forever until you get it. Another is binding controls in VB .NET. If in code I create the connections and dataset and I want a textbox to display the customer name, you won't find the answer in this book and I think that's basic stuff. The thought of having an example where you select a customer from a grid and display the info of that customer on labels or textboxes bound to the record is no where to be found in this book. I'd like to know how to update/delete them as well from those textboxes but as said previously the only control used in the entire VB .NET section is a datagrid, you'll know more about datagrids than you'll know what to do with and I think he should've branched it a little to other controls. Now, I'm searching on my own again on how to bind a dataset to a textbox.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent performance tuning examples
Review: This book has is full of great information on how to get the best database performance from your code. The chapter on the SHAPE command was especially helpful on how to speed up my code just by changing the syntax. This is a must-have book for anyone using ADO and ADO.NET.