Pro ADO.NET 2.0 - By Sahil 'El Maliko' Malik
Well, I typically only blog about books that I like but I just came across one. Sahil just released his new ADO.NET book [Pro ADO.NET 2.0] and it's a friggin masterpiece. I could sum it up in one sentence as so “If Aishwarya Rai was a book, she'd be this book”. If you don't know who Aishwarya Rai is, she was my former girlfriend for a few years but we broke up b/c long distance relationships don't work. Anyway, if you are looking for an ADO.NET 2.0 book, this is the book for you. This isn't my typical plug for a book, I'm co-authoring an ADO.NET 2.0 book and well, for each chapter I wrote, Sahil honestly did a notably better job than I did in many respects. It was brutal reading it b/c 1/2 of my was digging the subject matter, and the other 1/2 was saying “Dammit, why didn't I explain it like that.“
A few areas that really stick out are Transactions (which has been dramatically changed in the 2.0 Framework) both simple and distributed. He does a great job of explaining all the jargon in an easy to understand way. Connection Pooling is another (less sexy but every bit as important) area that stands out. So many people get into trouble here and he covers all of the why's so well that there's no room for any ambiguity. I also really liked his discussion of 'Cowboy' type connections - you'll have to buy the book to see what I'm talking about though.
So basically what Sahil did is take all of the answers he doles out in the newsgroups over and over, plus adding in the future answers he'll be giving, wraps it in a very readable and interesting format and Viola', out comes his book. Essentially what I mean by this is that he covers stuff that real developers are confronted with over and over everday. He intentionally focuses on problem areas and how to address them. When David Sceppa wrote the ADO.NET Core Reference, it was without a doubt the most comprehensive (and best) ADO.NET book there was. David's coming out with a follow up some time in the near future btw which will be another guaranteed winner. But Sahil took the same approach of covering every nook and cranny of ADO.NET and then added in all of the observations that he's come across in the newsgroups and his blog. Having written this a few years after interacting with the community is what makes this a true masterpiece. When writing a book, it's hard to know exactly what people want in every area and how much. But considering how much time he spends interacting with people, he was able to guage that pretty well (and having Frans' insights probably didn't hurt either)
Another nice thing about this book is that he doens't puss out, I mean uhh, shy away, from some of the trickier areas of ADO.NET. Be it in transactions or in databinding, if it's tricky, he's all over it.. Show me another ADO.NET book that discusses Many-To-Many relationships and databinding! So with each subject area, you get a whole list of gotchas, real world design considerations, performance concerns and some of that famous Punjabi humor that Sahil's noted for.
And just because I like ruffling feathers sometime.. The absolute best thing about this book is it's readability. It seems like almost yesterday that the world's most boring loudmouth was telling Sahil that his writing style needed to bend in order to be successful. That's what makes this book what it is! Let's just be glad that Sahil didn't take his advice, otherwise this book would have ended up with excellent technical content, but would probably put you to sleep faster than a bottle of valium chased down with some Jack Daniels.