The publisher O’Reilly has made the concept of a code “cookbook” popular.  Each “recipe” is presented in a problem–solution–discussion format.  First, Bill tells you what the method is going to do.  Then he shows you the code to do it.  Finally, he wraps up with a detailed discussion of the important stuff going on in the code, any pitfalls, applicability to certain scenarios, and more.  In the ADO.NET Cookbook, more so than others in the series, I found the method-by-method solution text excellent.  Each method was described in text, then shown in code, and then recapped in the discussion.

The book also includes some very popular questions among the newsgroups.  Recipe “6.6 Avoiding Referential Integrity Problems When Updating the Data Source” covers how to update a master-detail DataSet in the proper order to avoid database errors.  Recipe “9.4 Improving Paging Performance” details a good method to create a custom paging solution for DataGrids, information which should be more widely available than it is!  And recipe “3.10 Selecting the Top n Rows in a DataTable” shows the solution to a question asked so many times I can’t count!

If you have at least a basic idea of how ADO.NET works, this book is for you.  It won’t teach you all the basics, but the ADO.NET Cookbook will answer almost any “how would I do this in ADO.NET?” question you might have.  Overall rating:  5 stars.

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