Alternative to Views
If you're looking for a good core alternative to select entities, using custom queries, make sure you familiarize yourself with Entity Field Query (EFQ)

e.g, fetch 10 published article nodes with field_my_field value 'foo':

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();

$query-&gt;entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
      -&gt;entityCondition('bundle', 'article')
      -&gt;propertyCondition('status', 1)
      -&gt;fieldCondition('field_my_field', 'value', 'foo')
      -&gt;range(0, 10)

$result = $query-&gt;execute();

if (isset($result['node'])) {
  // nids are here
  $nids = array_keys($result['node']);
  // nodes can be loaded as such
  $nodes = entity_load('node', $nids);
}


More EFQ info here