Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming

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Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming

Now that Microsoft s .NET Framework is circulating in fullforce, every variant of programming book addressing the surplus of .NET topicsis being published. One of these is Mastering Visual Basic .NET DatabaseProgramming. Although the book does a commendable job at describing themajor facets of .NET and its data-access facilities, the title is somewhat of amisnomer. To be more accurate, the book should be renamed Programming SQLServer 2000 with .NET using VB.NET Syntax, because the authors dealexclusively with SQL Server 2000 as the relational database management system(RDBMS). Developers using DB2, Oracle, and open-source offerings such as MySQLor PostgreSQL will find nary a reference to these back-end alternatives.

Given this premise, authors Evangelos Petroutsos and AsliBilgin do a great job of summarizing the most popular options for data accessusing ADO.NET and delivering the presentation using VB .NET Windows Forms orASP.NET-generated browser pages. The authors presume little if any priordatabase development experience and dedicate the first quarter of the book toteaching database design fundamentals, SQL keywords, and popular Transact-SQL(T-SQL) functions. From there, the book provides numerous examples and clearexplanations of interacting with this data using .NET objects.

The book includes a CD-ROM containing all the source codeand projects, which apparently is an exclusive offer with the book because youcan t download this code from the publisher s Web site.

Overall, I would recommend this book to any neophyte .NETdatabase developer ready to leverage the power of SQL Server 2000 in theirapplications.

Mike Riley

Mastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming by Evangelos Petroutsos andAsli Bilgin, Sybex, http://www.sybex.com

Rating:

ISBN:0782128785

Cover Price:US$49.99

(960pages)