Database Programming With C#

Rating:
Summary: Rock solid
Review: A bit of an "old" book but still rock solid information presented in an easy to read fashion. I did find a few minor inconsistencies but not enough to deviate from the 5 star rating.

Rating:
Summary: Rock solid database infomartion
Review: A very good .NET database book for beginners and those who already knows a bit more. I enjoyed the writing which is very competent and I believe that this book is a very good and solid reference on most kinds of .NET database access.

Rating:
Summary: Very poor book
Review: After reading this book I found that ADO.NET didn't add anything new and/or interesting compared to ADO. Everything in this book is bad: The content covered is plainly missing the point of databases in .NET, the samples are pretty bad and way to many pages are used to reprocedure the help file contents. Even the website where we should be able to download the sample code is not working

Luckily for me I borrowed another book that told a different story: Databases in .NET and ADO.NET rocks!!

Don't buy this book!

Rating:
Summary: Best C# book I've stumbled upon yet
Review: Carsten Thomsen, Database Programming with C# (Apress, 2002)

Now this is a C# book (unlike the last one I reviewed here). Thomsen gets into the nuts and bolts from the get-go and starts the reader developing a real application. He gives us the underlying application logic, explains how it works (and tries to instill good coding practices along the way), all with an eye towards actual development rather than stand-alone sample programs that teach only a very few.

I wish he'd spent more time in the book's final chapter going over some of the code explicitly rather than just referring us to the code in the online zip files, but what's here is pretty fine. *** ½

Rating:
Summary: Good for begginers. Let down by inclusion of irrelevant info
Review: Database Programming in .NET is accomplished via ADO.NET which dominates the middle layer of any .NET database application. It can be done via C# or any other .NET language, and there are command line tools as well as Visual Studio.NET to assist the developer. So in a book titled "Database Programming with C#" we expect to find an in depth description of ADO.NET with C# examples demonstrating the use of the classes/methods to accomplish common database tasks.

We can cut this review short by just saying that the author delivers on the expectation with ADO.NET being covered in 2 (out of the 11) chapters. Chapters 3A & 3B describe the connected & disconnected layers and constitute more than a third of the book's size. However, what dominates these chapters and indeed the rest of the book is the many lengthy tables listing methods of the various framework classes. Not only does this get in the way of an enjoyable read but it is just a rehash of the already excellent help system.

Reading this book cover to cover can also become tiresome due to a lot of repetition. The flip-side to this is that the book can be used as a reference text. Claiming the user level to be intermediate-advanced is ambitious although absolute beginners will find an abundance of useful information.

So what do the other chapters cover? The first one claims to be a 'quick intro to C#' but ends up being an overview of .NET in general; The second one introduces databases at the most basic level and really should have been considered prerequisite knowledge (i.e. read Codd, Date or Elmasri etc); the fourth chapter describes VS.NET with its database tools/wizards and the fifth one describes structured exception handling (why?!). There is some good material in chapters 6-8 on stored procedures, views, triggers and message queues. SQLXML is introduced in the appendix but it would have been nice to see more XML coverage throughout the book.

To summarise, if we can leave aside the style and bad organisation of the book, most of the content will more than satisfy beginners.

Rating:
Summary: Databases using C#, great
Review: From the first few pages of the book I got a rather satisfying feeling about the authors writing style; conscise and very informative. After reading the rest of the book I can only say that its a real pleasure to read a book with so much information and yet written in such an easy-to-read manner. I am what you would refer to as a veteran programmer and I am also fairly good with .net programming. However, I am not too good with the concept of disconnected data access, but this book has helped me correct that. Great book.

Rating:
Summary: Great database book
Review: Good work Thomsen, this is a very good database book for use with VS.NET. I really like the detailed explanations of the many classes in ADO.NET and especially the handling of row changes. I must add that I actually like (unlike all other reviewers it seems) the property and method tables in the chapters as it makes it easy to use the book as reference when coding. I think typed datasets needs better explaining but that's the only things missing.

Rating:
Summary: Good database book
Review: Great book with all the details needed to get up to speed on not just ADO.NET but also MSMQ, Active Directory, and SQLXML
There are a few things that can be imporved, such as moving the many tables out to an appendix as suggested by other reviewers,
or just to end of a chapter? I still think the book is well worth a 5 star rating because of the many tips and detailed
information. I like chapter 8 the most but chapter 6 with its Oracle coverage is also worth a lot to me.

Rating:
Summary: Good c# database book
Review: I am a beginner to managed programming and I needed to get up to speed on database and particularly ADO.net connectivity from C#. This book literally saved my job as I was able to get up to speed in less than two weeks. I recommend this book to anyone in the same position. It's now by my side whenever I'm programming .net.

Rating:
Summary: Close to perfect
Review: I did some checking up on the author, which means I saw the rather mixed reviews about his first book. Based on that I decided to

take a chance with this book and I certainly don't regret it. I never read the other book, but this one is really good. It gives me

everything I need to get started with ADO.NET and C#, but also a great deal more. The best chapter is the SQLXML one, which is covered

so detailed any 'idiot' can use it, but also the chapter about server-side processing is cool. I especially like the bit on using

stored functions and procedures with Oracle.