I never use the query syntax, or ever see it in any of the books or blogs I read, to the point that it threw me for a loop a little bit when I was studying for the C# certification exam, to see how emphasized it was. I learned that style long ago when I first started, but the fluent, extension method style is easier and less ugly, IMO, particularly when you start getting into more complex queries, or LINQ-to-SQL, where you end up wrapping your multi-line LINQ query in parentheses and materializing it by calling ToList() or ToDictionary() at the end.