Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Resource - Help in a step by step approach !!!
Review: Being new to programming, I have decided to go down the .NET path, the ADO.NET Step by Step book has been invaluable to me in getting started with ADO.NET. A good concise guide for the beginner, ADO.NET Step by Step has given me good coverage on the ADO.NET technology, and allowed me to further explore it capabilities.
The structure of the book starts with the basics, and then progressively builds upon the knowledge from previous chapters. It was also a great relief to not spend hours typing in code samples, but to be able to simply load the samples and run them in Visual Studio .NET with no difficulty. I had a problem with one sample, but was able to successfully get it working based on what I had learned from the book.
The authors style is easy to read, and follow. Thus making the ADO.NET Step by Step a good book to spend time with, and can be read without having to spend hours in front of the PC all the time, but also in a standard reading format.
I would recommend this as a excellent book to someone who is starting out with ADO.NET and the Microsoft .NET Technologies, it will make the learning a pleasure, and is will structured to boot!
Thanks Rebecca, I look forward to reading additional titles from you in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Lot of C# errors
Review: Currently on chapter 9 of this book. Don't know about the VB, but there are a lot of C# errors. Maintaining a running list on my web site: http://www.waynekeller.com/ADO_errors.htm
Rating: 
Summary: Good Intro to ado.net
Review: First, this book assumes you are already familiar with either vb.net or c#.net. This may be the reason some others have had problems, as her examples require some familiarity. An example from early in the book is "Add a call to the RefreshValues procedure to the end of each of the CheckedChanged event handlers." If you don't understand that sentence, you will have a hard time getting through this. You will want to start with one of the vb.net books (I recommend Coding Techniques for Microsoft Visual Basic .Net by John Connell for starting out).Otherwise, all of the sample code has worked fine and the errata listed on Microsoft's web site only has a few code sample problems. So why 4 stars instead of 5? I think that she could have explained some of the topics and code a little more for those of us who are newbies to ADO. She seems to assume that the reader is familiar with ADO and is moving to ADO.NET and as a result does not explain some things quite as well as she could. One example of this is in DataTables. There is a table showing dofferent forms of the Tables.Add Methods. In the table, it shows 4 options and the text describing the entries in the table pretty much matches the table exactly. Then the examples only show 1 of the options and the remaining three options are never further explained or demonstrated. The other problem I had was that there seems to be no point to the code. You will add a foreign key to a table and the code will add it and then display the name of the key you added. But then it is never used again in he program. There's a lot of how, but not very much why. Still, I have used this book a few times now as a reference. It is the most complete book I have found so far in showing you how to do something in ADO.NET, so the technical content is very complete. So, here's the summary. If you're already comfortable with VB.NET or C#.NET and especially if you are moving from ADO to ADO.NET, then I would recommend this book. If you are just starting with .NET programming, start elsewhere and then come back here. At the very least, it makes a good, complete reference to ADO.NET.
Rating:
Summary: Confusorama....
Review: Have you ever been so deep into the trees that you cannot see the forest? That is what this book does to you. It guides you in creating connections in many ways (code, explorer, IDE) same for adapters, connections etc. you understand each step, you build an application, but then you ask yourself WHAT DID I JUST LEARN? NOTHING!!!! What is the relationship between this object and that? don't know.. where did this object come from? don't know..... on and on.. The examples are not "evolutionary" i.e. they don't start with a simple example and keep adding on to it. Instead each chapter has a separate example, you HAVE TO load it from disk, many of the concepts used in the example are foreign to you -- you are consistently promised to understand the missing links in other chapters-- and then you are expected to understand what you are doing when the example has one concept to teach you and 10 others that are foreign????!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: It is okay, not like other Step by Step Books.
Review: I basically got this book for the main reason my text book for my course i am taking is not the best and is a little vague at times.
Here's the thing, it is not like the other SBS books, the chapters (at least to me) seem out of order, for example, chapters 6 to 8 are relating the dataTables, dataViews, etc, after you are creating them.... Most the items that I feel are the basics are found after you go through a bunch of code that is unrelated. Luckily I do not feel this book is a complete waste of money; there are things that will make it a really good reference book, other then that, get something else if you are looking to learn.
Rating:
Summary: Poor book
Review: I bought this book mainly for the MCAD exam 70-315 and this book is recommended by the Microsoft. The exam is very heavy on ADO.NET and I have to confess I didn't do well, although I pass with a thin margin. In fact, this book offer little help in the exam. I rated it 1 star for the following reasons:
1) Too many mistakes.
2) Examples don't work - you cannot open web form or window form of the examples in the CD. The system complains ResX is not valid.
3) Chapter 10 (Data-Binding in Windows Forms) is total mess. I am wondering if the author herself know what she is writing.
4) Function protocol is confusing - Almost all function protocols in the book miss the parameter type, so you have to guess the data type of the parameters. Also, the parameter names use data type name.
5) The material is not in depth enough for the exam. Microsoft Press has done a poor job to let this book out. If they cannot fix its poor quality, the least they can do is to proof read once to eliminate hundreds of mistakes. They didn't.
Rating:
Summary: ADO.NET
Review: I did not get any examples to work, and when I emailed Microsoft, they said they can not create the error, because the examples work for them. Micorosft Visual Basic Step by Step at least had you create programs from beginning to end. This book has the program already created, all you have to do is add database components. When you did, they didn't work. I'm not an experienced programmer, but being a novice one, I was totally lost.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent step by step tutorial.
Review: I don't understand the negative reviews. I have this book and have worked through much of the code without any of the problems described in these reviews. Any "problem" (if you insist on calling it that) that I had even remotely similar to what I see described here turned out to be my own fault... nothing worthy of the bad reviews given here. By the way, did anyone who gave some of these poor reviews think about contacting Rebecca with questions? An author willing to provide assistance through email or news postings (like Rebecca does) deserves 5 stars. This book deserves 5 stars, her mastery of the topic deserves 5 stars, and her support of the book (and its students) deserves 10 stars. To anyone concerned about the poor reviews, don't be swayed. If you want a step by step tutorial on ADO.NET to learn from Rebecca and her book are a great educational resource... RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: A fine start to learning the nuts and bolts of ADO.net
Review: I found a sample chapter on data binding from this book on MSDN. Being new to the ADO.Net framework, it was just the explanation I needed. I bought it despite the negative reviews and although I haven't gone through it from cover to cover and tested all the code, so far all the samples have worked for me. I don't know what those other reviewers were complaining about but don't believe everything you read and don't let them dissuade you from buying a good beginner's resource.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for beginners who know some VB.NET / C#
Review: I found this book extremely useful to build my basic understanding with ADO .NET, Windows Form and Web Form data binding and XML. The book is easy to read and has lots of examples to practice. This book will not teach you VB.NET/C#. So you should be comfortable with the language of your choice before reading this book. Some examples have minor errors. At some place VB.NET code is referred in C# example. If you are an intermediate VB.NET or C# programmer then you can easily catch and fix them. I experience some problems with examples in Chapter 12 "Data-Binding in Web form" using MSDE 2000 SQL Desktop Engine
1- Connection Error with OLEDB Jet 4.0: "The Microsoft Jet database engine cannot open the file ......nwind.mdb"
2- Connection Error with OLEDBSQL: "Login failed for user 'SERVER_NAME\ASPNET'" I was able to solve it by keeping the MSDE password in the connection string. My connection string looks like this:
"workstation id=SERVER_NAME;packet size=4096;user id=sa;data source="SERVER_NAME\ InstanceName ";persist security info=True;initial catalog=nwind;password= AStrongSAPwd"
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