Book Review: LINQ In Action

LINQ In Action 
Author: Fabrice Marguerie, Steve Eichert, Jim Wooley
Publisher: Manning
No. Pages: 600

From Amazon

LINQ in Action is a fast-paced, comprehensive tutorial for professional developers. This book explores what can be done with LINQ, shows how it works in an application, and addresses the emerging best practices. It presents the general purpose query facilities offered by LINQ in the upcoming C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9.0 languages. A running example introduces basic LINQ concepts. You’ll then learn to query unstructured data using LINQ to XML and relational data with LINQ to SQL. Finally, you’ll see how to extend LINQ for custom applications. 

I just finished the book LINQ In Action.  All I can say is wow.  There is so much to cover with this technology and this book does a very good job of doing just that.

The book starts off with the origins and goals of LINQ then jumps right in with how to use and extend it.  Most if not all aspects of LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML are all covered very well.  The examples are easy to follow and understand which is important for me as I tend to learn from replicating the samples.  Most of the code snippets are in C#, but there are some VB.NET samples as well (where XML Literals are discussed).

The level of the book ranged from fairly easy to understand to advanced topics.  In my opinion, just about every level of developer should learn something from this book.  The parts I did not understand will come later as I will be referencing this book for the foreseeable future.