Book review: Programming Microsoft LINQ

David M Williams
Sunday, 01 March 2009 10:06

IT Industry - Development

LINQ promises programmers the ability to query data from any source within Visual Basic or C#. "Programming Microsoft LINQ," from Microsoft Press, is a tremendously detailed and helpful guide to the .NET Framework 3.5's LINQ implementation, within Visual Studio 2008.

”Programming Microsoft LINQ” was published in 2008 but was three years in the making, say the authors, Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo. It’s the very LINQ book they’d have liked to buy had it been available when they began their own LINQ investigations.

For those not in the know, LINQ is otherwise known as Language Integrated Query and was announced during the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September 2005. While most early discussions on LINQ focused on querying relational databases, the authors saw so many more rich possibilities.

They began considering a LINQ book and produced an earlier title, “Introducing Microsoft LINQ” that was based on beta 1 code (and which, apparently, received negative feedback.) This tome, “Programming Microsoft LINQ” is the successor of that work – the 2nd generation if you will – with feedback taken into account not to mention being based on the final released version of LINQ.

The book consists of 18 chapters, divided into five parts, along with three appendixes all for a total of 659 pages including index.

For those new to either C# 3.0 or Visual Basic 2008 it is recommended to begin at Appendix B or C which cover the new features introduced in those languages to support LINQ. (Appendix A covers the ADO.NET entity framework.)

The book proper kicks off with an introduction to LINQ, explaining its syntax and how to use it with in-memory objects. Straight away this shows that LINQ isn’t “just” a database query language, and also lets those of us new to the technology get a handle on its syntax and processes without being bogged down in ancillary code.

With this essential introduction down pat, the following chapters distil immediately usable information.