object databases

This book really explains the workings of ADO.NET in clear English. I suspect that the author must have spent many hours tracing the SQL traffic between PC and Database server.

Writing a database intensive application from scratch requires a lot of careful planning. After a few reads from this book, one can design an efficient data layer and deal with nasty problems such as concurrency, provider details and overall performance.

Outstanding book - I can't wait for an update when .NET 1.1 arrives.

I was generally very pleased with this book. It is an excellent reference for .NET developers using any of the more advanced features of ADO.NET. Bob's chapter on XML integration with ADO.NET is particularly well done.

I expect to be using this book as a reference for years to come.

My only compliant is that the book sometimes blurs the distinctions between SQL Server and other relational databases such as Oracle and DB2 UDB. Features that are only relevant to SQL Server are sometimes lumped together with more general database connectivity issues. It would have been clearer to have separate chapters for using ADO.NET with databases other than Microsoft SQL Server.

Book contains a lot of valuable information, unfortunately it reads like an owner's manual. The layout of the book is it's main drawback, it follows the same format as legal codes (ex. 7.2.2 Refining Dataset'S XML schema) and the text formatting of the book looks like it was done in Word. If you are a fan of the "developmentor series" you should like this book, otherwise go somewhere (anywhere, ok maybe except Sam's publishing) else.