Fabrice's weblog

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 :)

I have started reading the book.

Positives: I really like the examples. I really think that ,we humans, when we learn abstract concepts like computer science we always make-up examples in our mind. When we don't understand a thing is because we can't make those examples in our mind. Providing relevant examples for everything is a great way to let people know what you are talking about.

The style in which is written is using informal language which is IMHO easier to understand for most people. Everyone knows informal language. But not everybody is familiar and comfortable with some highly-formalized writting style.

Negatives:

The book doesn't put me to work at all. It doesn't give me any homework to do!!! You know very well that humans forget and the best way I know so far for not forgeting stuff is by doing them.

The ideal would be that I read this book and start applying the concepts presented in it on the next project. But you must realize that the next project might be months away and in a few months I'll forget most of what I've learned and would have to re-read the whole book again, or at least most of its parts.

Or sure I could just go on an open source project... but that approach requires considerable more amount of time than the approach of resolving exercises. It's no wonder that programmers on average read very very few books although the market is very rich in tehnical books. They prefer learning by doing!!!

So why not apply all the concepts while I read it????

Why are there no exercises????

I've been really disappointed by this and I've started searching through the pile of linq books that exist. After seeing a few books on linq, none of them seemed to provide exercises, I started searching on google for linq exercises, linq problems... and I've stumbled upon this: www.mindviewinc.com/.../Index.php

This was what I was searching for, although it's a sample preview and it doesn't cover by no means as much as you did in your book, this is the kind of book I was searching for. It really helped me understand what is going on inside linq and is choke full of good examples + exercises.

Please make sure you include exercises in your next book. This will make your book truly remarcable.

Overall I'd give your book 3.5 stars out of 5.

Cheers, Liviu.

Greetings from Hong Kong.

I bought the Ebook from the manning website, and after finish reading the first 4 chapters, I knew this is one of those books that I must have as a hard copy in my library, So I ordered a hard copy from amazon and hopefully it will arrive in the next few days.

Congratulation on writing such an outstanding book. I really like the section on Lambda expressions as I have been struggling with it for a while. I also can't wait to get to Chapter 13, which seems to be the juiciest chapter in the whole 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.

Although, I have not ready other books on Linq and probably I don't have to because I understand Linq well after reading your book. I believe your book "Linq in Action" is great. I really love how  your book dives into Expression Trees, diving into linq to sql and explaining the issues which we can run into, explaining pros and cons and when not to use Linq for performance reasons and how you have illustrated the performance comparison with big o notation. thank you

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.