Read On: Sep 09, 2013
Reading Time: 2 hours
Rating: 8/10

I am a big fan of LINQPad. It’s a core part of my consulting toolbag. I regularly demo it in my .Net tools talk, and I have also done a screencast on it. So I was delighted to see a book on the topic recently and gladly accepted to review it when asked.

The book Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad is available from Packt Publishing and authored by Sébastien Finot. It’s aimed at C# and .Net developers who wish to learn LINQ programming and test the easy way using LINQPad. No prior knowledge of LINQ or LINQPad is expected. It’s a small book (109 pages) and an easy read. The book is divided into 7 Chapters:

• Discovering LINQPad covers the installation, different editions of LINQPad and introduces you to the different sections of the GUI, as well as the different menu options.
• Coding in LINQPad teaches running simple queries and programs and also talks about adding assemblies, namespaces as well as the LINQPad Dump() utility method.
• Learning LINQ Basics is an introduction to LINQ.
• Discovering LINQ Query Operators continues with the LINQ tutorial.
• Databases and Relational Data covers LINQ to SQL and more LINQ query operators. It also shows interactive navigation with LINQPad in the DataGrid View as well as how to update data in the database.
• Using other Data Sources talks about LINQ to XML, Entity Framework and LINQ to WCF Data Services. These are great features in LINQPad which a lot of folks do not know about.
• Getting more out of LINQPad talks about the more advanced features such as customizing results pane and creating custom visualizers.

Overall, I liked the book and it’s approach to teach LINQ and LINQPad. The only advanced feature I found missing was hyperlinq, that can be used to dynamically build queries. I think the code samples might benefit from syntax highlighting to make them easier to comprehend.

A lot of folks just use LINQPad to fire LINQ Queries, but it is so much more than that. If you are not familiar with LINQPad, or use it only for the most basic of things, you should definitely check out this book.

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