Over on the Full Fat Things blog we just published the entity decorator module which we think significantly improves the developer experience for dealing with entities. Entity decorator

From that blog post....

Preamble

Tired of typing code with deep nested arrays like this to work with your fields?

$item_id = $node-&gt;{$this-&gt;field_name}[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'];<br>
Of course you are, so you use the Entity API.

read more