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A negative review for LINQ in Action

For a change, I won't post about all the positive reviews that our LINQ book received.

Today, I wanted to post about a negative review that has been published recently on Amazon.com. This review is interesting because it's completely different than the others. It gives the book a rating of 2 stars on 5.

Here is the content of the review:

LINQ with no action

I am disappointed with this book - it did not meet my expectations. I found many examples and it is really hard to use them because the author hardly explains where all comes from and why I should go this way and not another one. It sometimes confuses why, where and for what purpose the author shows an example and whether it suits my case. It is hard to decide because there are almost no explanations about roots of examples and basic theory.
However, I am happy with the fact that more and more books about LINQ come up and I do hope to find a proper one for me. Unfortunately, for now, I have to move from one book to another one for finding a solution.

Despite this review, LINQ in Action still has an average of 5 stars on Amazon.com, based on 20 reviews. I'd like to thank everybody who took the time to post a review.
And you, what do you think about our book? Maybe you could post your own review on Amazon.com (and/or on your blog of course)?. Good or bad, I invite you to speak your mind. We can always do better, and as authors we're interested in knowing your opinion.


Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net

8 Comments

  • I've not read yor book but I would assume if the other 19 rated it favourably then its a good book.

  • Fabrice-
    I'm still reading the book. It's really good. I'm learning more about LINQ than I thought there was to learn. I'll be giving it a good review when I'm done.
    -Gary

  • I have not yet read your book, but I can tell you there will always be someone to complain about your product or service, no matter how great it is. Keep up the good hard work. And good for you for showing the negative reviews as well. That takes a special kind of person.

  • I'm reading the book and i think it's very good :)

  • Liviu,

    Thanks for your feedback. I'll keep your request in mind.
    However, it seems that what you're looking for is a training course or a training manual. This is really different than the kind of book that we wrote.
    It's not possible to provide both what we already have in LINQ in Action and a complete set of exercises in one single book. Unless, of course, we double the number of pages and we spend twice the time we spent writing it. This was not possible for us and Manning for all kinds of reasons, the main ones being time and money.

    You seem to believe, and you're not alone, that LINQ in Action is a valuable book. Writing a companion book with only exercises would be great, I agree.
    Until this happens, readers can still reproduce in Visual Studio all the examples we provide in the book. As authors, we certainly recommend this, and we paid attention to provide examples that work and that can be hand coded by readers. We did intend our code samples as exercises for our readers. The complete code samples available as a download can be considered as the solutions of these exercises.

    Thanks again for sharing your opinion and for your advice.

    Fabrice

  • Thanks Kenneth. It's always nice to learn about happy readers!
    Don't forget to post your own review once you have completely read the book :-)

  • I think the book is great too - but I came unstuck in Chapter 11 - the database in the Data directory - does not appear to be the same as the one used to create the DataClasses1.dbml datacontext (one has ID as a primary key and the other has SubjectID as a key - same for the Review table). It really is a fantastic book - but this would be my only complaint - hard to work out which connection and datasource is being used - an SQL Script to gen the DB would have been great.

  • It would be great if we have exercises after each chapter. This will help people mastering things with hands on and will instill confidence in them. A person best learns when he apply theory to some problem solving.

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