Rating: 
Summary: False alarm
Review: I am not a VB developer but it seems like this book is for VB developers. Authors have no idea of C++/C# programming. It has less ADO.NET but more ADO programming issues. Authors talk a lot but there is no code which makes the book worthless.Can you live without "finally"? I can't. Author have no idea and never used "finally".
Rating: 
Summary: Hands down the clearest book on ADO.NET
Review: I bought many books to assist in clarifying what the best ways are to do things in ADO.NET, and this is the only one I continue to read. The authors and their support staff obviously have a clearer and better understanding of both the technology and best practices to provide the reader with real world examples of how to do many things concerning data in .NET. Other books throw a load of scrambled information at you and 'dance' around the subject without definitively answering the questions that need to be answered, effectively writing black box 'definitive sources' about the subject. If you're a developer looking for the right answers, the best practices for doing things, what is bad and what is good and why, then this should definitely be in your library. With such a wealth of information regarding ADO.NET available (yet none of it conclusive), you can easily spend most of your time consulting online documentation and reference books and all of your efforts be a waste of time. This book is the only exception, and I would recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Great Read, Great Humor, Good Advice
Review: I never thought I'd read a database programming book with coded sex messages. But the catching of SqlException in the examples with a variable name of 'sex' and the ensuing 'sex.Message' has tickled my sense of humor and had me scouring the rest of the code examples for the authors humor. In so doing I've actually been learning and more importantly understanding far more about ADO.NET than I have been able to do with some of the other dryer books on ADO.NET I bought at the same time. Thanks for the amusement Bill and Zebedee.
Rating:
Summary: Vaugn is the Man!
Review: I thought I had already reviewed this book but I guess I didn't. This is a totally killer book from start to finish. There's simply nothing that isn't great about it. It's well written and never gets boring. Vaughn has a total command over what he writes and has an amazing knack for keeping things interesting (which is very important in computer books). His examples are all things you encounter every day. His insights are those of someone's who's dealt with virtually every scenario his readers may face. And in a nutshell, it's just a totally cool book by a totally cool author. I am an abject book nut and I ADO.NET is probably one of my favorite subjects. With that said, I'm by default a huge fan of Mr. Vaughn but if you are going to do any ADO.NET programming, this is a must have title!
Rating:
Summary: Vaugn is the Man!
Review: I thought I had already reviewed this book but I guess I didn't. This is a totally killer book from start to finish. There's simply nothing that isn't great about it. It's well written and never gets boring. Vaughn has a total command over what he writes and has an amazing knack for keeping things interesting (which is very important in computer books). His examples are all things you encounter every day. His insights are those of someone's who's dealt with virtually every scenario his readers may face. And in a nutshell, it's just a totally cool book by a totally cool author. I am an abject book nut and I ADO.NET is probably one of my favorite subjects. With that said, I'm by default a huge fan of Mr. Vaughn but if you are going to do any ADO.NET programming, this is a must have title!
Rating: 
Summary: Great, Goes Beyond The Online Documentation
Review: I would recommend this book, like other Bill Vaughn (BV) books, after you have been messing around with the technology (ADO.NET) for a little while. That is you should struggle with your own app for a couple of days first then pick up this book. If you are brand new to ADO.NET, and programming against databases in general, I would look elsewhere for an introductory book, but would come back to this book after you feel you have mastered the fundamentals. The feeling you get when reading this book is similar to playing a video game then going back and reading the manual that came with it. "Oh thats what THAT does" is a common feeling that I had. BV does an excellent job of going beyond the documentation, and the book comes with a CD loaded with code, but unless you have a laptop to look at it, say while you are at a conference, it is hard to appreciate the code in its entirety. Where BV thinks it is important to show actual code in the text, there are snippets that fill in the blanks nicely. I also liked the IMHO boxes that appear everywhere. In fact thats the first thing I read in each chapter to give me a flavor of what was in store. The book is primarily written from the point of view of you being the programmer talking to the data source directly and exposing the data source to interested clients. That is you are either the middle tier programmer or the client in a client server world. My only complaint is that the book spends an amazing amount of time explaining how ADO (ADOc) is alike/different from ADO.NET. This is useful if you are an accomplished ADOc programmer, but utterly useless if you are starting from scratch with ADO.NET. This is, apparently, how BV learns and teaches new stuff. That style was evident when he first started writing about ADO when RDO was on the way out. It is an excellent way to learn new technology if you knew the old technology, but a hindrance if you knew little or nothing about the old subject matter. Oh and by the way Bill......i will always call close on my SQLConnection objects. I got the message!
Rating:
Summary: Informative, informal and insightful.
Review: I've had a look through several different books covering this topic and this is the most pleasurable to read by a long shot. Bill's style is irreverant yet authoritative which makes for a very interesting read -- He's not afraid to comment on things both good and bad (unlike some books on the topic which seem to ramble along as an accompaniment to MSDN) about it, and he's qualified to do so as an ex-serf from the Big House itself. Big thumbs up.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is a disappointment
Review: If you only do two-tier client/server development, and you want a repetitious, backward-looking overview of ADO.NET written in "Hitchhiker" style...this book is for you. If you want definitive Best Practices for how to program ADO.NET for n-tier, Windows Forms and Web Services, you'll need to look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Hands down the clearest book on ADO.NET
Review: Of my 8 books with ADO.NET, this is the one I am using. I needed to know how to manually run through and manipulate rows and columns. I needed to use complex business logic with a database. My work involves more than displaying some simple DataGrid. This book gives the examples for manually code ADO.NET.
Rating:
Summary: Tops for practicality on the job
Review: Of my 8 books with ADO.NET, this is the one I am using. I needed to know how to manually run through and manipulate rows and columns. I needed to use complex business logic with a database. My work involves more than displaying some simple DataGrid. This book gives the examples for manually code ADO.NET.
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