LINQ in Action

Most of the reviewers have given high marks for this book. No issue with that, as long as the first six chapters of this book are concerned. It gives the best intrduction on subjects such as lambda expression and various Linq syntaxes. But the most important chapters should have been those dealing with Linq in N-tier architecture - chapters 7 and 8. But those were written in such a confusing manner that, at the end of those two chapters, you are left wondering why you spent money and time on this book. It is a pitty that almost all internet articles, including those on MSDN, deal with Linq as if it is an add-on to Microsoft Access programming and show pages and pages of "drag-and-drop and voila it works great!!" approach. I don't think anyone could write a successfull n-tier Linq code with that approach. Although this book goes little further than the drag-and-drop gimmic, it could have avoided so much fluff and concentrated just on what is needed for a real world n-tier programming using Linq. But unfortunately I don't know whether there is any better book treating Linq as a serious enterprise development tool.

This book is a well-written tutorial that is generally easy to understand. The logic is straightforward and the language is much better than in most of the other books I have been studying on ASP.NET 3.5 and C#. My only complaint is that I would have liked to see more depth in some sections. To fill in some of the gaps I have found "C# 3.0 in a Nutshell," from O'Reilly Media, to be very helpful, but I wouldn't consider it a replacement for this book. There is an online forum that goes with "LINQ in Action," and two of the authors and some other contributors are very responsive to questions. There are also some files of source code that can be downloaded from the Internet.

This was one of the best technical books I've ever read. It was easy to follow and understand. The examples were very clear and the section on the new features of VB and C# were wonderful and needed in order to understand the rest of the book.

I was slightly disappointed that most of the examples in the book were printed in C# instead of VB. BUT, I downloaded all the example projects and utilities and those are excellent! ALL of the examples are available in C# and VB. They are correct and a great on-the-go blueprint for my routines.

It was also very nice that they talk about (in easy-to-understand terms) the performance implications of different implementations.

The cover is a bit dorky, but you shouldn't judge a book by its cover!

A great buy for the novice LINQ programmer.

The book covers a lot of topics that emcompass LINQ including LINQ basics, but also LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML. I like that it starts out with a discussion of the problem and doesn't dive directly into the solution. In addition, I think it teaches the technology without resorting to starting with database applications as the example. Anyone who has heard me talk about LINQ knows that I can't stand that LINQ to SQL is the wrong way to teach it to new people...they didn't fall into that trap.

In addition, I really like that there are lots of good examples and a great index. There was never an example I was looking for that the index didn't help me find. That's becoming rarer in books. I really liked their coverage of LINQ from both the consumer of LINQ and the provider of LINQ. Their discussion of the LINQ to Amazon provider provided quite a lot of good insight into how the inner workings of LINQ are put together.

My only hesitation at completely loving this book is that all the examples are either in C# or VB. This lends the book to feel a bit schizophrenic. I would have preferred a more bloated book where all the example in print were in both languages. This is especially true of LINQ because the language integration of LINQ is very dissimilar between the languages.

Overall, I would recommend the book to anyone trying to learn LINQ as a technology.

LINQ in Action, at 600 pages provides a substantial introduction and in-depth discussion of LINQ, its history, its impact, and most important - its syntax and features. I found this book easy to navigate, given that many developers (I know I do) moved between LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML and LINQ to SQL througout the working day. When you stumble over a particular query, I found it easy to find a relavent sample in the index.

If you haven't had an opportunity to move into the .NET 3.5 Framework world and use C# .0 or VB 0 syntax yet, then this book will arm you with the background necessary to move productively into the new 'Query Centric' programming paradigm - one free of complex 'for' loops and deeply nested 'if' statements (and free of embedded SQL string statements).

Although hefty in size, I recommend this book if you seriously want to move beyond the basics and really understand how to use LINQ.