As with the other Murach Press books I have reviewed, this book is extremely readable and shows step-by-step how to develop database applications with VB. NET 2005 and ADO.NET. This book is best suited to a someone new to database development with Visual Studio 2005 but that has a passing familiarity with VB syntax. If you are unfamiliar with flow control statements and VB syntax, you might want to look at Murach's "Visual Basic 2005" book first. I highly recommend this book for entry to mid level developers.
This book has plenty of good code examples and screenshots. Throughout the book, a Payables System is developed. You can download the book's code from the Murach website.
One area that made this book stand out over many of the other VB.NET programming books available was it's emphasis on ADO.NET. While this book starts out showing you how easy it is to create a simple program that accesses a database and displays data without your having to write any code, it develops the topic further explaining that this approach may have some limitations and that using a 3 tier architecture might be a better way if you want to develop robust, maintainable applications. However, don't look for an extensive discussion on architecture. since that would be confusing to the book's target audience. The author keeps the discussions fairly straightforward and practical.
This book goes into a little more detail on using SQL Server than many of the other VB.NET books. As well as covering parameterized queries, there is a chapter on transactions. While the intent of this book is not to teach you SQL Server, it does a good job of showing what is necessary to work with ADO.NET.
Section 3 covers using ADO.NET with web applications. This section assumes some familiarity with ASP.NET and web development. The coverage here is straightforward and clear enough that a minimal prior knowledge of ASP.NET would suffice.
In section 4, the author shows how to used typed datasets, table adapters, and unbound controls. It even includes a discussion on typed versus untyped datasets to help you decide which to use in a given situation and to understand some of the pros and cons of each.
Finally, section 5 covers some other types of data access that you may need to be familiar with. It includes a quick overview of accessing and using XML data and also a brief chapter on the version of Crystal Reports that comes bundled with Visual Studio 2005.
In summary, if you are looking for a book that brings together VB.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server in a straight forward, uncomplicated way, then you should get this book.