It's great to find a book that is exactly what it says it is on the cover. Scott Barker added the subtitle to the book: "Tips, Tutorials, and Code" and that's a pretty good description.

• Technique
• Steps
• How It Works
• Comments

Those who are expecting a start to finish tutorial might be disappointed. Barker doesn't provide too much of the basics for those who aren't already familiar with VB .NET programming. Scott states that his book is for "the serious developer" and he's serious about that. For example, Chapter 1, traditionally reserved as an introduction, jumps right into programming bound controls for Windows forms.

This book might also be subtitled, "Problems I encountered programming ADO .NET during consulting contracts and how I solved them with VB .NET." The programs in the book, while they are great examples of real world programming, don't seem to be intended to teach ADO .NET as much as they are a collection of "best programming" practices. For example, early on in the book, Scott suggests a function to build a Connection string, BuildCnnStr, that he uses routinely in the rest of the book. It's a simple function and creating systems using modular code like this is a great 'best practice'. But if you opened the book somewhere in the middle and didn't know about it, you could spend quite a while looking for a method with this name in the Microsoft documentation. For people just learning a new technology, it might be better to actually build the Connection strings in the examples where they're visible even though that makes the code slightly longer and less flexible for a "real world" situation.

Although source code for the book is downloadable from the publisher web site, Sams Publishing, I found it easier to simply build the applications from the descriptions in the book since the book code is 'wrapped' in an application designed to install it that actually makes it less accessible.

About the Author

Scott Barker can be considered sort of a Microsoft 'insider/outsider'. A seasoned veteran of both the corporate environment, Microsoft, and the world of the independent consultant, Scott's background is primarily databases. He has written half a dozen books previous to this one, all of them about Microsoft Access. He maintains a web page devoted both to his consulting practice and this book at a personal web site AppsPlus. To his great credit, Scott responded to emailed questions promptly and helpfully.