| The Guide to the VB .NET Books: | |||||||||||||||||
| Update: The ADO .NET Books | |||||||||||||||||
 Long time viewers of this page are probably familiar with the About Visual Basic Guide to the VB .NET Books. We're finishing off this ADO .NET tutorial with an update to the guide where we consider some leading ADO .NET books! ----------------------------------------- About.com also has a database focused site at
databases.about.com. ----------------------------------------- |
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If you're looking for a good book on ADO .NET, the market presents a few special problems to you. First, ADO .NET isn't a development system by itself; it's a 'companion technology' to some other development system. In this series, of course, we focus on the dynamic duo of VB .NET and ADO .NET. But some of the books that are available focus on C#, C++, or even Java as the development environment. Fortunately, this doesn't make them unusable for VB .NET developers. Due to the uniform object API used by ADO .NET, it works in just about the same way in any development environment. Even if you don't know a semicolon from a semi truck (semicolons delimit statements in C# and Java), you can probably translate the use of ADO .NET objects into Visual Basic without much trouble. Another problem is that a lot of ADO .NET books are written by and for hardcore DBA (Data Base Administrator) types, rather than programmers. Many feature chapter after chapter telling you how to tune SQL Server, or techniques for configuring OLAP data warehouses ... hardly the kind of information you need if your problem is understanding the properties exposed by an ADO .NET DataSet object. A third problem is related to the first. ADO .NET is frequently paired with another technology like Web Services or ASP .NET rather than being discussed on its own. A discussion of managing state in ASP .NET in a multiserver environment doesn't help you debug your ADO .NET code. Fortunately, there are some good books out there, and even the ones that aren't so good have ususally have juicy nuggets you can use that will justify the price. Here's a wrapup of some of the best. Database Programming with Visual Basic .NET and ADO.NET ADO .NET in a Nutshell The next book obviously has problem (or advantage - depending on your point of view) number three above of multiple focus in the same book, but the ADO .NET section is good enough to make it worth listing. Visual Basic .NET Developer's Guide to ASP .NET, XML and ADO.NET Visual Basic .NET Database Programming |
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