ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers (Second Edition) 
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Author Bill Vaughn
Publisher APress
Length 792 pages
vbRad Rating: 5 fingers up. (5 out of 5)
Reviewed by Robert

The first edition of this book was great. This one adds several hundred pages and coverage of ADO.NET. I consider myself to be an expert at ADO, in no small measure, thanks to Bill's books. Second edition adds more depth to the ADO part and includes coverage of my pet peeve of ADO: the complete uselessness of the ConnectionTimeout property. Cool.

Be advised, that the ADO.NET part of the tome starts at basics, unlike ADO.classic and only then proceeds to cover the more advanced topics. Regardless, even if you are an ADO.NET guru (there aren't many at the time of writing), you'll still learn a great deal.

Just like the first edition, this is a great read, even though he continues use newsgroup-like language akin to IMO, AFAIK, etc… That's probably because he hangs out on the ms news server and the VBDATA-L list. IIRC, that was my only annoyance with the first edition of this book. I did like his off the cuff humor which kept the normally dry subjects witty and interesting. I was LOL going through chapters. Sometimes even ROTFL.

Anyway at under 40 bucks this is a great buy. Vaughn's technical expertise is really showing here. This one gets a permanent seat on my book shelf.


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