An excellent well written book
|
I looked through the reviews of the books with SQL in the title and opted for this one as is had the highest number of 5 star reviews.
Having read 5 chapters in the last day my conclusion is that this is one of the best technical computer books I have ever read, and I have quite a few. The progress through the book is well paced with good thought provoking examples. An acceptable number of times I have had to re-read sections to fully understand the concepts and this has noticably improved by understanding of the SQL language.
I would recommend this book to anyone with equivalent experience, which is a few months of SQL table design/querying such that you have the basics already in hand. This moves you on from the basics.
Get this book if you are looking to improve SQL querying. Do not get this book if you are looking to program data access in .Net or something else, get a C# book then.
|
|
|
Thorough explanation of SQL language & much more
|
|
This book is mainly aimed at programmers, but I purchased it along with a number of other books to better understand what SQL is, and how it can help me to write better queries in an ACCESS database, rather than to write programes. This book is authored by some of the worlds experts on the S.Q.L language and of coarse on the dialect T-SQL. I can't say how useful it will be to programmers, but anyone who is in a scientific or technology design job, will find the subject fascinating and will very quickly begin to understand how a server application works. If you don't understand mathematical logic, then I would strongly recommend your finding a book on it first before attempting to read this book, but any design engineer or scientist should be competent enough not to need to read up on the subject. If all you want to do is write better queries for ACCESS databases though you will be better purchasing "Microsoft Access 2003 Forms, Reports, and Queries", which I purchased from Amazon a while ago. If you want to understand the SQL language behind Access purchase this book also.
|
|
|
Fantastic stuff
|
I have used SQL for about 20 years and TSQL for about 10 and, although I did not finish the book yet, I am delighted with what I have read so far.
Superb and very clearly explained.
A "must by".
|
|
|
Everyone can learn from this book!
|
Itzik is an internationally renown lecturer, trainer and writer who anyone familiar with SQL Server will immediately recognise.
The two books that he has authored in the "Inside SQL Server" series "T-SQL Querying" and "T-SQL Programming" are probably going to be the two defining books on T-SQL written for SQL 2005. They are very well written books, which even the most experienced SQL Server DBA or Developer, will learn from.
|
|
Are you a SQL Server database developer? Buy this book!
|
Having been bored stiff by many a technical book in the past I found this a refreshing read. Having developed for a number of years using T-SQL I would say I was more of a parrot-fashion database developer until I read this book. The knowledge imparted is invaluable and I would definitely recommend it. This is a book mainly for SQL Server 2005 but there are many 2000 samples for replicating the functionality.
Whilst it has a number of early chapters focusing on querying fundamentals I would still suggest this book is for people who have some experience of SQL Server 2000\2005 T-SQL and not beginners. As the chapters progress Itzik starts giving examples of common development problems and then solves them. Two that spring to mind are creating server-side data paging or dealing with hierarchies. The chapters on query tuning really are a treasure trove. I have seen many a developer look at a graphical query plan with an "oooh that looks pretty" face without any knowledge as to its meaning. This will give a good foundation explaining why the little pictures change and what all the cool figures mean!
Itzik also goes into detail about the most important T-SQL language changes and when to use them and when not to. He shows the performance implications of each choice and critically explains them for the mere mortals amongst us (including me).
I find myself reading a paragraph, asking myself a question only to find he has answered it in the next paragraph. A well written book on a difficult subject matter. It is clear that Itzik has a passion for SQL Server and set-based logic and this is apparent in the writing style throughout the book making it an easy read (if your a database guy/gal).
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada