Information About the book:
Book Title: Entity Framework Tutorial
Book's Page: http://www.packtpub.com/entity-framework-tutorial/book
Book Cover:
Chapters: 8
Type: Tutorial
Publisher: PACKT Publishing
Author: Joydip Kanjilal
Introduction:
Since the release of .Net 3.5 SP1 & VS.NET 2008 SP1 which include Entity Framework v1 I started to play with EF and discover its usage and differences between it and LINQ to SQL.
Last month I got a change to have a book that walks through Entity Framework by tutorial. This book was Entity Framework Tutorial. The books itself is very small. It has a clear focus and scope; to put you on the road on how to build & use Entity Model of Entity Framework following comprehensive tutorials.
About Entity Framework Tutorial Book:
The book is small one, 228 pages on 8 Chapters. This books is targeting beginners who never used or even heard of Entity Framework. But of course the reader should be experienced developer with Microsoft .Net (general), ADO.NET & C#.
Entity Framework Tutorial at glance:
The book is divided into 8 chapters. 7 Chapters about Entity Framework and the last chapter is an introduction about ADO.NET Data Services.
Chapter 1 Introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This chapter talks about What is EF?! and why it is not considered just another ORM. It also explains Entity Framework Architectural components. Finally in this chapter you'll setup the tutorial database that you are going to use across the book. This chapter is a must if you never heard or know what Entity Framework is about.
This book was written during Beta version of EF. So chapter 1 has a section that explains how to install Entity Framework.
Chapter 2 Getting Started. Pure tutorial step by step to build your first Entity Data Model. It will make you familiar with Entity Framework Designer and generation tools (EdmGen tool). The tutorial covers both, using Entity Framework Designer and using EdmGen tool to generate Entity Data Models. Finally you are going through another tutorial to build very simple ASP.NET Web Application that will consume the EDM created earlier. This tutorial will introduce EntityDataSource data control.
Chapter 3 is about Entities, Relationships and the Entity Data Model. You are going to understand Entity Types, Entity Sets & Relationships. It will also shows different types of Entity Inheritance. It will also show you different Designer Windows and how to interact with them. Finally it will take you through EDM layers (CSDL Conceptual Schema Definition Language, SSDL Storage Schema Definition Language & MSL Mapping Schema Language).
Chapter 4 Working Stored Procedure with Entity Data Model. Through Tutorial it will show you how to map create, update & delete functions in Entity Data Model to existing stored procedures in your database. Also it will show you how to map stored procedures that return custom entities to your EDM. During all this will walk through the issues that currently exists in current version of Entity Framework when mapping to stored procedures and shows you step by step how to resolve them.
Chapter 5 Working with Entity Client and Entity SQL. Introducing new Entity Client APIs with new T-SQL like language made specifically for Entity Framework, Entity SQL. This chapter talks about when you might wish to use Entity SQL over LINQ to Entities. It walks through the features of Entity Client APIs & Entity SQL to do different types of operations against your Data Model such as querying and paging through your data, executing commands, transaction management etc... Also It show different operators and functions available in Entity SQL.
Chapter 6 Working with LINQ to Entities. Assuming you know nothing about LINQ, this chapter gives you an introduction about LINQ in general and different flavours of LINQ. After this it will focus on the main subject about LINQ to Entities and how to do queries against your EDM using LINQ to Entities. This chapter also talks about the differences between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities.
Chapter 7 Working with Object Services Layer. It is time to talk about Object Services in EF and its features. This chapter walks through different subjects such as add, modifying and deleting objects using object services APIs. Attaching & detaching objects from and to contexts. Change Tracking of objects and serialization and deserialization operations on entity objects. This chapter will show you the importance and powerful of Object Services.
Chapter 8 Introducing ADO.NET Data Services. An introductory chapter about Data Services and its usage showing the difference between Data Services and normal Web Services. Exploring System.Services.Data namespace. And walk through how to expose your EDM to Data Services and consume this service by querying it, insert, update and delete using your data service through Data Services Client Library.
Personal Opinion:
This book a good tutorial and starting point to Entity Framework. Especially for those who want a crash start in short time. This book never talks about limitations of Entity Framework so never expect that it will show what you cannot do with Entity Framework or the issues currently exists in current version except for those mentioned in chapter 4 about mapping to stored procedures.
The book is based on Beta Version of Entity Framework. At the time of writing this review the source code of the tutorial wasn't updated by the publisher, so you'll take some time to make it work on .NET 3.5 SP1 RTM and VS.NET 2008 SP1 RTM.
The book has few mistakes so you need to be careful will reading or applying code snippet mentioned in the book.
May rate for this book is 3.5 out of 5.
Conclusion:
This is a tutorial book and not a developer reference guide. It will take you step by step to build your Entity Data Model with Entity Framework. This book fulfil its mission as complete tutorial & how to guide. Suitable for beginner developers who are experienced with ADO.NET & C# 2.0.