Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Very good book regarding SQL

Customer Rating:

This is a fair thick volume containing a wealth of knowledge regarding SQL server. Much of the work and example are specific to MS SQL Server 2005, but where this is the case it is clearly pointed out, often with examples to achieve the same effect in previous version given. That said much of the theory (specifically in the initial chapters of the book) are more general and can be applied across all major relational database implementing SQL. The author is clearly an expert in the field. The book does contain a chapter on Optimising SQL queries, however it is fairly sparse and should not be used as much more than an introduction and "a few pointers" on what to look for when one begins optimisation. I look forward to reading "Inside Microsoft® SQL Server(tm) 2005: Query Tuning and Optimization" (another book in the series) but have not done so yet. The book continues to fairly indepth and advance search techniques, covering subjects such as pivot queries, along with commands like ROLLUP and CUBE. I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who has some previous experience in database development and is looking to improve their skills in the field.

An excellent well written book

Customer Rating:

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

Customer Rating:

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	Customer Rating:
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!

Customer Rating:

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.