If you look up the word "reference" in the dictionary, I'll bet they have a picture of the Nutshell books to illustrate it. One of the most recent (April 2003) additions to O'Reilly's highly regarded 'Nutshell' series, this reference on ADO .NET is a genuinely worthy member of the team. And, like their teammates, this one comes with a fully integrated update that slides smoothly into the Visual Studio Help system. That means Dynamic Reference, Index, Content - all the Help tools you get with Visual Studio - are simply extended with these extraordinarily complete references.

Even better, the update and the book have the Framework 1.1 update included in them even though the book was published at almost the same moment that the update was available from Microsoft.

Again, O'Reilly gives you both a book and software you can actually use (rather than just study) for your book buying dollar. Such a deal!

In fact, the only thing I could find to complain about (from the point of view of a Visual Basic programmer) is that all of their examples are in C#, not VB .NET. But in the case of a large library of objects like ADO .NET, I found that it really doesn't matter much. It's really not very difficult to figure out what the VB .NET code should be based on the C# code. The CD upgrade to your VS Help system is entirely compatible with VB .NET.

This one is a keeper. Recommended!

About the Authors

Bill Hamilton is a rare issue: There is almost no information available about him on the web. (But a couple of other people who share his name are very interesting! They're not him.) I'm reduced to repeating his "official" bio from O'Reilly. He's a "software architect specializing in designing, developing and implementing distributed applications using .NET and J2EE technologies. Over the last ten years, he has provided consulting services in B2B, B2C, B2E, data integration, and portal initiatives for banking, retail, accounting, manufacturing, and financial services. An early technology adopter, he frequently evaluates, recommends, and helps his clients use new technologies effectively. Bill has designed and helped build several award winning software packages."

Matthew MacDonald is an educator, developer, and possibly most interesting as an author, he writes around. Rather than having an established relationship with just one publisher, MacDonald has published with a lot of the leading technology publishers.(Many Wrox writers "were" virtually 9 to 5 Wrox employees. Alas, Wrox is no more as of this writing and it remains to be seen whether it will be again.) He's also passionate about his technology and you can gain a lot of insight about him by visiting his consulting company web page

Two other books by MacDonald are reviewed by About Visual Basic here and here.