WHY USE WHERE CLAUSE BEFORE SELECT STATEMENT IN LINQ 3.5

WHY USE WHERE  CLAUSE BEFORE  SELECT  STATEMENT  IN  LINQ 3.5

This is how syntaxes of LINQ are defined. You must use WHERE before SELECT if you are placing a where condition. You don't have to use WHERE if there is no condition and you want to select all records.

Its important to think of the SELECT and WHERE slightly differently than you do with SQL.  SELECT is for projection or transformation.  That means you use SELECT to transform one item into another or you can use select to transform an item into itself.  A WHERE clause is for filtering. It takes a predicate and based on a boolean, filters the results.  You do not need to have SELECT to perform a WHERE.  For example, the following is perfectly legal:
 
var collection = new int[]{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6};
var itemsGreaterThan3 = collection.Where(x => x > 3);