Pro ADO.NET Data Services Book Review
Pro ADO.NET Data Services Book Review
Lately I’ve been reading a 
lot.
One of the books that I read is
Pro ADO.NET Data Services -
Working with RESTful Data from
Apress which I’ll review in this post.
Review
The book isn’t long, its about 300 pages and has
four major parts:
- ADO.NET Data Service Fundamentals
- ADO.NET Data Services in the Real World
- ADO.NET Data Services from the Outside
- The Future of ADO.NET Data Services
The first part is written well and it gives a very thorough
understanding about the world of RESTful services and
ADO.NET data services in particularly. The part includes a lot
of material about the foundations of data services and how to use
them. I really liked the exercises that are spread all over the chapters
that help you to get started with the features that were discussed
early.
The second part was to short to my taste and only discussed
how to implement a data service alongside with an existing
legacy services. It shows how to build a new data service for
a customer service alongside of a legacy customer service which is
a legacy SOAP service. I really expected more full examples of
building applications with ADO.NET data services or a discussion
of were ADO.NET data services are fitting in the real world.
The third part included a coverage of a lot of subjects including
Ajax, Mashups, Silverlight and BizTalk. The information of the
Ajax and Silverlight chapters weren’t enough for my taste and
I think that the authors drilled down to much with the chapters
about Mashups and BizTalk. To be honest I read these two chapters
in a very fast manner because I’m very far away from these worlds.
The last part was a discussion about the future of ADO.NET data
services.
Summary
The book is very helpful especially in the first two parts. I think
that if you want to learn about ADO.NET data services this book
is not enough. In the internet there are a lot of materials that weren’t
covered by the book. Moreover I think that the book could be written as
a major part of a book about .NET RESTful services and not as a stand
alone book. My rating of the book is 3.5 stars out of 5.