Conventions Used in This Book

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As with all books in the Sams Teach Yourself in 21 Days series, I've used a few conventions in this book that I hope will make it easier for you to learn about the topics we're discussing.

All the source code I've included in the book will appear in monospace font, and the larger, complete code will be called out in numbered listings. As with other books from Sams, you can download all the listings, as well as other relevant material, on the book's Web site at www.samspublishing.com by searching on my name , the title, or the ISBN. (This is also the place to look for errata that is corrected after publication.)

To call special attention to a topic, I've used the following in-text features:

Note

Notes offer you extra insight into a particular topic. They also indicate where you can go to find additional information about the topic at hand.

Tip

Tips give you special advice about the topic we're discussing.

Caution

Cautions alert you to common mistakes and pitfalls of a subject we're discussing.

Sidebars

Sidebars provide you with more information about a subject related to what we're discussing.

The New Term icon lets you know when I'm introducing a new term in the chapter.

The Analysis icon (which usually follows a numbered code listing) indicates that I'll be discussing the code at length and offering insights as to how the particular code applies to topics discussed in the chapter.

Each day ends with a Workshop section. This section contains a quiz to help you remember the key concepts discussed during that day, as well as an exercise designed to enable you to try out your newly gained knowledge. I've left the instructions for each lab fairly vague by design so that you'll have to work through your own solution, although I also provide a possible solution. The exercises are designed not to take much time so that you're not bogged down in writing code for my sample scenario, and can instead focus on applying what you learn to your applications. After all, that's why you want to learn ADO.NET, right?

VB or C#?

This book includes code snippets and listings in either Visual Basic .NET (simply referred to as VB) or Visual C# .NET (C#). The tack I've taken is to alternate roughly the language used on each day. I include notes and parenthetical comments throughout the text to indicate differences in the coding practices for each language when the difference is significant enough that I thought it might cause confusion. I believe this approach is effective because it highlights the fact that the syntax that pertains to ADO.NET is for the most part identical between VB and C#. At the same time, it should serve to expose each language's adherents to the other language, and once again confirm that the most important aspects of programming in .NET are understanding how the common language runtime works and understanding the classes of the .NET Framework, such as those that comprise ADO.NET.

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