Rating: 
Summary: Great for beginners and those that are confused!
Review: I had read several "vb.net for sql" type books and was left confused by the limited ado coverage. This book also has limited coverage. WHY do i give it 5 stars? Because with ado.net you really must understand all the concepts before you can go deep into one certain area (like most books try to do). This book brang me from confused to crystal clear!
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible Text
Review: I read the first five chapters and gave up. The book is poorly writen and very difficult to follow. Most of the samples have problems which leaves you spending the majority of your time debugging the code. Many of the programs won't run with Option Strict on. I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone and yes, my copy is for sale.
Rating: 
Summary: Alot of padding in this book to get more pages!
Review: I thought the book was a good intro to ADO.NET until I realized that every single example is repeated twice! Once with VB code and once with C# code. But instead of just putting both the VB and C# code, they actually repeat all the pictures (which are the same) and all the steps (which are the same). I thought this was a really lousy way to trick the customer into thinking they were getting a more in depth book. Approx half the pages in this book say the same thing!
Rating:
Summary: Worth it for one example
Review: I understand some folks are having problems with the examples, but honestly the one I needed (related to data relations and binding relations to dropDownLists) worked like a champ, and that example alone saved me tons of time. I had a problem with my own example using Datarelations and the author responed pretty quickly with an explanation of what the common problems might be. It did not in the end resolve my problem entirely, but it did show that this feature of ADO.NET worked and the problem in my code was really mine. This one working example was more than worth the price of admission for me.
Rating:
Summary: I hope the errors are obvious to everybody!
Review: I'm doing the C# version of this book (the C# examples follow the VB examples and I am getting the most of the code to work. There are numerous errors (here are my notes form pages 100 to 152):
1. Page 100 the nameof the function is private void daCategories_RowUpdating(object sender, System.Data.SqlClient.SqlRowUpdatingEventArgs e)
2. Page 102 e.RecordsAffected.ToString(); always returns 1 row even if you've changed more than one.
3. Page 105 the function is private void daCategories_RowUpdated (not RowUpdate)
4. P. 120 has the AddRows("AAAA1") outside the try/catch so the code as written generates an exception rather than shows an example of a caught transaction error. It works if you move it inside the transaction code try.
5. As 4. on page 122 (VB)
6. As 4. on page 124 (VB)
7. As 4. on page 126 (C#)
8. The working of the example on Chapter 5 doesn't work the way it does in the book because selection of different customers isn't written in the code, so only the first customer order is displayed.
9. P.152 should say double-click the Create Relation button because that's the code it then goes on to write.... so that's 50 pages out of over 500. I can't get the rest in inside 1000 words, so I hope the author can get on this site and give us the link with the full list of corrections. I'd like to not recommend this book but what option does the reader have. It's required material for Microsoft MCAD (maybe the mistakes are part of the test?).
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: i've read this book, its a great one, even if ya know nothing about previous ado, this book will teach ya everything ya need
and yeah examples worked with me, i guess all these ppl with nagative reviews have a problem with there VS.net or something
Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment
Review: Normally I wouldn't give a bad review on a book just because it was too advanced for me. This case is different, however. I am one of the people who came from the fabulous visual basic.net step by step book. It really got me interested in microsoft press. VB step by step stayed true to it's title. ADO.net, however, failed miserably at this. Although it does follow a weak numbering system, it isn't really step by step at all. The flow pattern is horrific. I must admit I was excited after reading the first chapter. It was extremely easy to follow. All hell broke loose though when chapter two came about. There is plenty of room on the market for this book, as I am sure there are many who are ready for this high level of understanding. But please don't publish a step by step book which doesn't follow the usual beginner to intermediate content of other MSpress step by step books. I suppose I will go with the old standby and give vb.net database programming for dummies a try. Perhaps that will cover the foundation needed to give this book another try.
Rating:
Summary: Uninspiring
Review: Not much to add to other negativ comments here. I somehow figured if it's from MSPress, it's gotta be good.
I'm at page 150 (of 500, ughh) and already found several timeconsuming mistakes in the examples. The chapters are boring and a pain at the same time. I often find myself guessing where to add lines. It reads like a helpfile generated from sourcecomments...The mixing of VB.net and C#.net isn't very helpful either. They'd rather make one book each.
Oh well, gonna hangle thru it anyway (as fast as possible). NOT recommended
Rating:
Summary: For people having trouble with the exercises
Review: OK. I've been playing with the chapters and like many other readers, I ran into a LOT of trouble with the codes, and again, like many other readers, my solution files won't even run. But I realized that (after 5 chapters of frustration) if you copy the sample database file (which is needed by all the chapters in the database) to the default location, most, if not all, problems will go away, because the connection strings used in the sample codes are HARD CODED. So when I copied the sample database file to MyDocuments folder, the computer was searching under C:/ and of course it will crash immediately. For first-time ADO.NET users like myself, this supposed-to-be-obvious problem is actually pretty difficult to find. Once that problem gets squared away, the book is easy to follow.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Guide to ADO.NET
Review: Rebecca has done it again! Rather than the typical, this is how we used to do this in ADO, and now this is how you do it ADO.NET book, she has taken the path that developers need to take, and started from scratch - This is ADO.NET Starting with the fundamentals of ADO.NET, walks through the basic principals of the new object model, and what you can do with the object model. I would recommend this book to everyone - ADO.NET is such a fundamentally different approach to data access from Microsoft, that we will have to learn again from scratch, and this is the book to get the foundations right. I have found this to be invaluable in getting up and running with ADO.NET Regretablly - link most of the .NET books - code samples are for the Prerelease versions of the .NET Framework, but I am sure that MS Press will release updates to these to work with the release version of the .NET Framework. Though it should be noted that they still provide a excellent example of how to use ADO.NET Once again well done Rebecca - and keep the good books comming!
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