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Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming
Now that Microsoft s .NET Framework is circulating in full force, every variant of programming book addressing the surplus of .NET topics is being published. One of these is Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming. Although the book does a commendable job at describing the major facets of .NET and its data-access facilities, the title is somewhat of a misnomer. To be more accurate, the book should be renamed Programming SQL Server 2000 with .NET using VB.NET Syntax, because the authors deal exclusively with SQL Server 2000 as the relational database management system (RDBMS). Developers using DB2, Oracle, and open-source offerings such as MySQL or PostgreSQL will find nary a reference to these back-end alternatives.
Given this premise, authors Evangelos Petroutsos and Asli Bilgin do a great job of summarizing the most popular options for data access using ADO.NET and delivering the presentation using VB .NET Windows Forms or ASP.NET-generated browser pages. The authors presume little if any prior database development experience and dedicate the first quarter of the book to teaching database design fundamentals, SQL keywords, and popular Transact-SQL (T-SQL) functions. From there, the book provides numerous examples and clear explanations of interacting with this data using .NET objects.
The book includes a CD-ROM containing all the source code and projects, which apparently is an exclusive offer with the book because you can t download this code from the publisher s Web site.
Overall, I would recommend this book to any neophyte .NET database developer ready to leverage the power of SQL Server 2000 in their applications.
Mike Riley
Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming by Evangelos Petroutsos and Asli Bilgin, Sybex, http://www.sybex.com
Rating:
ISBN: 0782128785
Cover Price: US$49.99
(960 pages)
