By Scott Klein
408 pages
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470041811/

Many technical books are designed to be reference material (i.e. the only time you open it is to flip to the index in the back and read a short section to help you debug a very specific issue).  Those have their place, but when something as new and powerful as LINQ comes out ... I want to get a book that is a good cover to cover read, and dives into fundamentals, best practices, and even advanced scenarios.  This was that type of book.  I still use it as a reference from time to time, but after reading it through, I instantly felt more comfortable with LINQ and understood how to leverage it in ways that I might have missed otherwise.

One random tip ... LINQ to XML is not as great as they make it out to be.  Although LINQ to objects/collections and LINQ to SQL is crazy powerful, terse, and a more natural and productive way to help with an array of common programming tasks, I have also had some experience with LINQ to XML ... and I can't say the same thing for it.  The author covers all of these LINQ-related topics, so you will probably see what I mean ... but I just wanted to mention it.

Overall, this was well written, had concise, real-world code examples, and was a great cover-to-cover read.  I would recommend it to anyone.