Essential ADO.NET (DevelopMentor)

Review: I am dissapointed with this book. Bob certainly seems knowledgeable, however the book is poorly organised, contains too much 'waffle' for my liking and far too little space is given to what are, imho, the most critical parts of ADO.NET - namely Dataset, DataAdaptor. Dataset starts at page 127 and finishes at 176. 40%ish of the pages are code / output. DataAdapters start on p177 and we're all done by p223. There's more text about DataAdapter, but it's not 'Developmentor' quality. Coverage of using stored procs is - at best - poor, the tried & tested enterprise developers standard sel/ins/upd/del procs - using a primary key value are barely covered. Other important topics such as DataColumnMapping are glossed over and the section on Data Binding to GUI components quickly moves into the world of the ASP.NET DataGrid. The poor organisation of this book means you're forever flicking from one section to another to find what you're after (if it's there at all). If you want a 'Reference' title this might be for you, however if you're actually trying to write an application, using stored procs, winforms etc then I'd look elsewhere.