Most people make fun of me when I travel.  No matter where we go, or for how long we go for, I always have a travel backpack with me that is filled with books.  Reading is my passion, and I admit that I really love reading books about software topics and learning new things.

One of my latest acquisitions for my library is LINQ in Action by Fabrice Marguerie, Steve Eichert, and Jim Wooley, and published by Manning.  I have to say that at least over the past year or so, Manning has become the best publisher out there.  They fill a niche that I fell that O'Reilly has stepped away from.  O'Reilly used to have the best books in the early days of Java, but then they got caught up in a "publish before it's ready" phase, probably due to competition from Wrox.  Wrox, and this is my opinion, probably has the lowest quality of books of any publisher that I've seen.  Anyways, back to Manning's excellent book...

LINQ in Action is an excellent introduction to LINQ, or Language INtegrated Query, that was introduced with .NET 3.5.  LINQ has promise to completely revolutionize development in .NET to make it easier to interact with data of all sorts.  LINQ provides support for querying and manipulating collections of objects, processing and transforming XML documents, or querying and interacting with persistent data in databases.  To go a step further, LINQ is also extensible to allow developers to add LINQ support to other data sources such as WMI collections, event logs, or other custom data sources.

While I haven't made it all the way through the book, I do have to say that what I've learned about LINQ and .NET through the first few chapters has opened my eyes to a lot of new features of the .NET Framework.  I can't wait to start using them in my own programs and blogging about them here.