OVERALL ASSESSMENT:
Doug and Donny are the most plainclothes writers out there on the market today…and I mean this with the most sincere of praise. Each possesses an uncanny knack for explaining the most complex of technical topics in an easy-to-follow manner, appealing to the newbie or otherwise non-expert reader. And they consistently manage to do this while not alienating the advanced developer audience at the same time. Throughout this book, their genius is on display. 

This should be THE book you buy after going through an initial title for an introduction into .NET programming, as it will pay for itself many times over in your usage. I've heard people discount the book's concept because they unfairly felt it was just literary regurgitation of every other .NET title's chapter(s) on using ADO.NET to perform data access, stretched out into an entire book. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book offers so much more into getting past simple code constructs and really optimizing the management of your data. Through this concept, the reader gains a greater understanding of the .NET Framework. 

Doug and Donny's use of product knowledge, humor, and real-world applicability is equally enticing, educational, and entertaining. While the book is by its nature top-heavy in ASP.NET data access concepts, it also tackles some of other common concerns, like working with BLOBs, XML, data caching, authentication, and validation. Such is not commonly found in many traditional data access texts, and is a very welcome value-added change.

Through a combination of timely documentation, ample exhibits, and well laid out chapters, the reader will learn the obvious data access principles, but also so much more (such as indirectly absorbing a more refined, disciplined way to write .NET code), just from the fact that the book is extremely well written. More than 7 months in the making, the various examples are current to be 100% compatible with Beta 2 of the .NET Framework, so barring any major dramatic syntactical changes in the final release of .NET (which at this point is highly unlikely), the book will be relevant for some time, not to be run obsolete in 6 months. 

The book is a wealth of great information, presented beautifully, but also succinctly and without 35 pages of traditional computer science theory and historical data behind coding concepts. They get to the point, state their case, and move on to the next thing. It's a very effective read. 


WHAT I DO LIKE IN PARTICULAR: 

• All code examples are written in both Visual Basic.NET and C#. This is a critical element to this book's success.
• There is a LOT of code with many different examples.
• Although catering to a much wider range of .NET topics, the associated Web site (http://www.dotnetjunkies.com)  is an excellent companion to the book.
  Doug and Donny don't forget to make the pages sing with style. Many ASP.NET books will include enough code to get you going with the functional aspects of designing Web Forms, but the authors' examples work great…and look great. Simple aesthetic alterations to the resultant pages are a nice addition to those of us who cringe when we see Times New Roman on anything online. They fortunately didn't neglect the fact that pages should look good, too, which is attractive to traditional Web designers!
• A wealth of associated namespaces, methods, properties, and attributes are listed in a very healthy appendix section; this is contrary to most .NET books tendency to just list the methods that they felt were important, as per their examples. The back section of the book makes for a great reference companion.
• Newer programmers to the .NET Framework will come to appreciate (whether they realize it or not) the coding discipline indirectly enforced throughout the book, like prefixing variables, using TRY…CATCH…FINALLY constructs, and properly indented code.
• The fact that this is a high-end data access book doesn't rule out the little guy. An equal amount of much attention is given to Access, Oracle and all other OLEDB application users as is to those of SQL Server. Thus, the book is naturally relevant to a broader audience.
• Even thought the authors cleanly state their own preferences when performing certain operations, they make reference to and show examples of the different ways something can be coded.
• The XML Web service absolutely rocks. In nearly all .NET books - especially those that came out in the early months of Beta 2's mass distribution, Web services were arguably the key chapter wrapping up all previous discussions about .NET programming…but then contained simple, weak, basic math-type of "software as a service" applications. Not here. "The Big Cheese" is ultra cool.
• The examples are very fun to work with, and very practical. I rarely stop while reading a book to try out a coding example, opting to do it later…but I found myself ceasing my reading to write simple data access pages and Web forms because it was so cool. (Case in point: the duo's custom paging solution.)
  
  
  WHAT I HAVE CONCERNS ABOUT:
• It's immediately apparent from even reading a few chapters that Doug and Donny each have their own writing style, which is great. Unfortunately, this translates to writing code, as well. One's style is very structured, disciplined, and organized, with all VB.NET syntax properly indented, capitalized (even though not necessary); while the other tends to be a bit more relaxed in his syntactical style. Having a uniform way of presenting the examples would be more reinforcing for the learning, I think.