Data is everywhere, growing by petabytes per year, and a lot of it is stored in databases. Millions of applications are also out there—at the beginning of 2021, there were 1.2 billion websites—and most of them need to access data in databases. And I haven’t started on the Internet of Things yet. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, says that global IT spending will reach $3.7 trillion in 2021 (http://mng.bz/gonl).
The good news for you is that your skills will be in demand. But the bad news is that the pressure to develop applications quickly is unrelenting. This book is about one tool that you can use to write database access code quickly: Microsoft’s Entity Framework Core (EF Core). EF Core provides an object-oriented way to access relational and nonrelational (NoSQL) databases in the .NET environment. The cool thing about EF Core and the other .NET Core libraries is that they can run on the Windows, Linux, and Apple platforms, and they’re fast.