Part 1. Getting started

Data is everywhere, growing by petabytes per year, and a lot of it is stored in databases. Millions of applications are also out there—half a million new mobile applications in 2016 alone—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 says, “Global IT Spending to Reach $3.5 Trillion in 2017” (www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3482917).

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 databases, and in EF Core 2 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 Windows, Linux, and Apple platforms.