How should I get the value contained in a particular field of a Drupal 7 custom node?

Question

What is the "proper" way to get the value stored in a particular field within a custom Drupal node? I've created a custom module, with a custom node, with a custom URL field. The following works:

$result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE title = :title AND type = :type", array(
  ':title' => $title,
  ':type' => 'custom',
))->fetchField();
$node = node_load($result);
$url = $node->url['und']['0']['value'];

...but is there a better way, maybe using the new Field API functions?

Solution

Not sure why EntityFieldQuery is being discussed, but ok. :) You're actually going to want to use the field_get_items() function.

if ($nodes = node_load_multiple(array(), array('type' => 'custom', 'title' => $title)) {
  $node = reset($nodes);
  if ($items = field_get_items('node', $node, 'url')) {
    $url = $items[0]['value'];
    // Do whatever
  }
}