LINQ in Action Book Review

This book is a pure pleasure to read. The presentation of content is awesome. They breakdown code in a new refreshing way that I have not seen before. Maybe it is done in all the Action Books from Manning, but this is the first I have read. They use code annotations to show what the code is doing at all the key points, highlighting important concepts. The beginner will benefit greatly from this, as will the experienced developer getting into the new C# language features. The book presents both VB.NET and C# code examples. This is definitely cool. It is something that has been lost with many publishers. I guess the publishers know they can possibly sell 2 of the same book if they make one for each language. Yeah, yeah, I know… you should be able to easily bounce back and forth between languages with no effort. Well since I don't allow VB.NET on any of my projects, I rarely get to see it since books no longer present both languages. So this is a refreshing change. I still have to deal with inherited projects, so it is nice to have a book that contains my language of choice, but makes available the VB.NET syntax incase I need it. The book has an awesome introduction covering the history of LINQ, which also presents all the problems that LINQ solves and the design goals of linq. The book covers ever new feature in the .NET 3.5 languages (C# and VB.NET) that were needed in order to implement LINQ. They include Implicitly typed local variables, Object initializers, Lambda expressions, Extension methods, and Anonymous types. The book covers LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Objects in great detail. They also offer a bonus chapter from the Manning Site for LINQ to Datasets. One of my favorite sections was Performance Considerations. They do a great job covering tradeoffs. The book winds down with a chapter on extending LINQ and how link fits into an n-tier architecture. The downloadable code is very well organized and is very usable. The authors have a great support site. I highly recommend any developer moving into .NET 3.5 add this book to their library. It will arm you with everything you need to produce production level code.