Ready to take advantage of LINQ with C# 3.0? This guide has the detail you need to grasp Microsoft's new querying technology, and concise explanations to help you learn it quickly. And once you begin to apply LINQ, the book serves as an on-the-job reference when you need immediate reminders.

All the examples in the LINQ Pocket Reference are preloaded into LINQPad, the highly praised utility that lets you work with LINQ interactively. Created by the authors and free to download, LINQPad will not only help you learn LINQ, it will have you thinking in LINQ.

This reference explains:

• LINQ's key concepts, such as deferred execution, iterator chaining, and type inference in lambda expressions
• The differences between local and interpreted queries
• C# 3.0's query syntax in detail-including multiple generators, joining, grouping, query continuations, and more
• Query syntax versus lambda syntax, and mixed syntax queries
• Composition and projection strategies for complex queries
• All of LINQ's 40-plus query operators
• How to write efficient LINQ to SQL queries
• How to build expression trees from scratch
• All of LINQ to XML's types and their advanced use

LINQ promises to be the locus of a thriving ecosystem for many years to come. This small book gives you a huge head start.

The authors built a tool (LINQPad) that lets you experiment with LINQ interactively in a way that the designers of LINQ themselves don't support, and the tool has all kinds of wonderful features that LINQ, SQL and Regular Expression programmers alike will want to use regularly long after they've read the book.-Chris Sells, Connected Systems Program Manager, Microsoft