Question

I am Printing all latest records depending on when a book was published.(PubEnd). Now I am able to print all the books that are published in descending order.

I need to print the 20 Latest published titles. How can I do that??
Right now the code below is printing all books published in descending order.

var query = docs.Descendants(name)
        .Select(x => new
                        {
                            Title = (string)x.Element(ns + "TITLE"),
                            Status = (string)x.Element(ns + "STATUS"),
                            PubEnd = (string)x.Element(ns + "PUB_END")

                        })                                              
        .Select(x => new
        {
            Title = x.Title,
            Status = x.Status,
            PubEnd = x.PubEnd,
        }).OrderByDescending(x => x.PubEnd).ToList();

foreach (var book in query)
{
    if (book.Status == "Published")
    {
        Response.Write(book.Title);
        Response.Write(book.Status);
        Response.Write(book.PubEnd);
    }
}

Answer 1

1. use Take(20)
2. Why are you building anonumous objects twice with the same values?

This should be what you need:

var list = docs.Descendants(name)
               .Select(x => new
                    {
                        Title = (string)x.Element(ns + "TITLE"),
                        Status = (string)x.Element(ns + "STATUS"),
                        PubEnd = (string)x.Element(ns + "PUB_END")
                    })
               .OrderByDescending(x => x.PubEnd).Take(20).ToList();

If you want to get distinct result:

var list = (...).OrderByDescending(x => x.PubEnd).Distinct().Take(20).ToList();