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BlueForest Networks
Essential LINQ
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional - March 22, 2009 ISBN-10: 0321564162, ISBN-13: 9780321564160
Author: Charlie Calvert
Dinesh Kulkarni
600 pages
Essential LINQ - book reviews: 8
“Charlie and Dinesh bring important skills to this project that enable them to show how LINQ works and the practical ways you can use it in your daily development process.”
From the Foreword by Anders Hejlsberg
LINQ is one of Microsoft’s most exciting, powerful new development technologies. Essential LINQ is the first LINQ book written by leading members of Microsoft’s LINQ and C# teams. Writing for architects, developers, and development managers, these Microsoft insiders share their intimate understanding of LINQ, revealing new patterns and best practices for getting the most out of it.
Calvert and Kulkarni begin by clearly explaining how LINQ resolves the long-time “impedance mismatch” between object-oriented code and relational databases. Next, they show how LINQ integrates querying into C# as a “first-class citizen.” Using realistic code examples, they show how LINQ provides a strongly typed, IntelliSense-aware technology for working with data from any source, including SQL databases, XML files, and generic data structures.
Calvert and Kulkarni carefully explain LINQ’s transformative, composable, and declarative capabilities. By fully illuminating these three concepts, the authors allow developers to discover LINQ’s full power. In addition to covering core concepts and hands-on LINQ development in C# with LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Entities, they also present advanced topics and new LINQ implementations developed by the LINQ community.
This book
• Explains the entire lifecycle of a LINQ project: design, development, debugging, and much more
• Teaches LINQ from both a practical and theoretical perspective
• Leverages C# language features that simplify LINQ development
• Offers developers powerful LINQ query expressions to perform virtually any data-related task
• Teaches how to query SQL databases for objects and how to modify those objects
• Demonstrates effective use stored procedures and database functions with LINQ
• Shows how to add business logic that reflects the specific requirements of your organization
• Teaches developers to create, query, and transform XML data with LINQ
• Shows how to transform object, relational, and XML data between each other
• Offers best patterns and practices for writing robust, easy-to-maintain LINQ code
Excellent book to learn LINQ (and a few other things) from
I found Essential LINQ to be an excellent book to learn LINQ from. It was extremely easy to read, accurate, and useful. I liked that the authors took the time to explain and teach the underlying technologies. As a result, they have made LINQ approachable, even for someone with minimal experience beyond basic C# and .NET Framework knowledge. After reading this book, I felt very confident in using LINQ, and I embarked on a project which made use of it. It turns out that I did indeed learn a lot from the book, as I rarely needed to refer back to it or check the documentation. In addition, I was finding myself using many of the other concepts taught in the book, even in places that LINQ did not require them.
Some people (including another reviewer here) may say that too much time was spent on LINQ to SQL or not enough was devoted to LINQ to Entities. Honestly, I've looked at Entity Framework, and it is way too heavy for many projects. Microsoft may be pushing EF, but it won't get used in many places due to complexity, so I still see LINQ to SQL having a role to play in the future. A little more space for LINQ to Entities would have been good though. I also would have liked to see some LINQ "recipes" instead of some of the details at the end of the book.
Overall, though, this is a great book to learn LINQ from. If you are an established LINQ expert, you may want to pass on it, but if you learned LINQ "on the fly" and didn't really learn how it works or the underlying ideas, this is a bood book for you too.
J.Ja
Justin M. James
31 July, 2009
Good book to start getting pumped with LINQ
I've been doing LINQ for about a year now and this book was really good to give me new ideas, and by showing different approaches to the same solution to learn different types of syntax.
I specifically liked the more advanced chapters because they helped me advanced in my LINQ knowledge. The examples are carefully shown and clear that make everything so simple and easy to understand even when defining the concept may be a bit hard for the person with hardly any LINQ knowledge.
This book is really good because it has great information and one of the greatest technologies made by Microsoft in the last few years. LINQ is great and if you are learning about it this is a great book that will get you started and point out all the strengths and solutions in an elegant manner.
Oscar Azmitia
13 July, 2009
Very Good Introductory Text
This is a very good introductory text to LINQ.
What I especially liked was that authors dedicated some time to nomenclature, which many other books simply omit. After establishing a solid foundation, the authors provide a digestible balance of depth and pragmatism. This is actually the third book I've read on LINQ, and wish it had been the first. While some of the other books go into technical minutiae, and may serve as comprehensive references, I think this book does a better job at explaining what LINQ is, how it works (to sufficient but not excruciating depth), and how to use it for the common business cases most of us are likely to encounter.
If you're about to learn LINQ, or have questions about some of the basics, consider reading this book.
John P. Puopolo
06 May, 2009
Too much space for LINQ2SQL
Unless you're absolutely new to LINQ, this is not the book you're looking for. It spends undeserved space explaining LINQ to SQL, a technology already deemed as obsolete by the own Microsoft. And there's practically no content on the Entity Framework, which right now seems the path recommended by Microsoft.
On the other hand, you'll find a lot of "funny" details, as a six page table listing key bindings in Visual Studio 2008... that is, a very cheap trick for making a longer book.
Ian Marteens
13 April, 2009
"Essential LINQ" well named
Charlie and Dinesh boil LINQ down to its essense; everything you need to know about LINQ without fluff. The progression of information is excellent, building in a carefully crafted sequence from the basic to the complex. Expect the "light bulb" to turn on many times while you're reading this.
Noel Rice
05 April, 2009
