ADO.NET Literature

Question

Books

Fellow .NET developers :).
Advise, please, the suitable literature on the given technology.
Yes, and more. Since I'm interested in this topic for educational purposes, are you also interested in the relevance of ADO.NET today? I now mean purely ADO.NET. Is it used where today? Or something else has come to replace it (Entity Framework, NHibernate) and there is no point in this direction.

Answer 1

ADO.net is old. Although a lot of tools can generate code for it and all controls work well with it, it is very difficult and inconvenient to maintain. The code is just awful. If you want to work only with MS SQL, look at the Entity Framework, if there is even the slightest possibility that there will be another database, then it is better to learn NHibernate right away.

Answer 2

I've worked quite a bit with both Entity Framework and ADO.NET, and in this case I want to defend the latter. We cannot say that ADO.NET is unambiguously bad, and Entity Framework is unambiguously good. They have different areas of application. Entity Framework, being an ORM, is just a higher layer of abstraction, and uses ADO.NET internally.
Choose Entity Framework (or any other ORM framework) if database queries are more or less standard, not far from basic CRUD operations. However, if you need to use things that are specific and complex for MS SQL, such as recursive CTEs, SQLCLR, FILESTREAM, Bulk Insert, hints and other things, then you simply cannot do without ADO.NET, no matter how much you want to.
In summary, if you need near-CRUD functionality, then feel free to choose ORM, and if something is more complicated, or you care about performance, then ADO.NET.
Regarding the literature on ADO.NET, there is a lot of it, including in Russian, however, as a rule, ADO.NET is described within the entire BCL or FCL. I can recommend the well-known series of books by Andrew Troelsen "C# 20xx and the .NET xx Platform", as well as Christian Nagel's book "C Sharp 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform for Professionals". Also, ADO.NET is quite often described in books devoted to working with MS SQL Server.