SQLAuthority News – Book Review – Learning SQL on SQL Server 2005 (Learning)

SQLAuthority.com Book Review :
Learning SQL on SQL Server 2005 (Learning) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Sikha Bagui, Richard Earp

Link to book on Amazon

Short Review:
This books covers simple and complex concept in very easy language with lots of examples. Every beginner can learn a great amount of tips from experienced authors. Whether you are a self-learner, new to databases or in need of SQL refresher, this is good read.

Detail Review:
This book is written by two conceptual strong SQL Server Gurus. SQL Server is growing extremely popular in the area of high-performance data applications. It is very important to learn about new features of SQL Server.

This book truly represents the concept and the motive authors holds while writing the book. The book is written as systematic guide to learning SQL using SQL Server 2005 – a relational and multi-user database.

This book starts with simple SQL concepts of management studio, simple select clauses, creating database and tables from scratch. It starts getting more involving and building difficult concepts on previously addressed easy concepts. Chapters about joins, sub queries, constraints are written with conceptual depth as well as lucid and simple language.

Authors suggest that this book is expected to be used by schools and SQL training organizations. I will add to that this book is for everyone who just wants to enjoy reading about SQL. This book should be read with hands on SQL Server practice. Reader will get most out of this book while doing exercise at the end of the book.

Review questions and exercise at the end of each chapter kept me occupied for long time. Few of them are very simple and few of them I have learned from this book. If you are experienced SQL programmer, I still suggest that you will enjoy reading the review questions. I will list few of those questions here.

When would you use the ROWCOUNT function versus using the WHERE clause?
If you are going to have too many nulls in a column, what would be data type to use?
What is the maximum number of the rows that a self join can produce?
Which function can the WITH TIES option be used with?
Is SELECT INTO allowed in a view? Why or why not?

Not always all the time, everybody wants to learn about difficult subject and in depth analysis. There are few times, when even experienced DBA and developers want to read back to basic concepts. I enjoy reading this book, if you are reader of my blog (www.sqlauthority.com) you will enjoy this book as this book is in agreement of my views of looking at SQL with simple logic but strong concepts.

There are few errors in the book but they are very minor and I was able to catch them easily. Authors seem to have good understanding about ORACLE in addition to SQL Server. That introduced some errors but on good side they are able to unleash few ideas which are not easy for SQL Server DBA to think of.

The chapter I enjoyed most is Joins Versus Subquery. Authors very easily explained their needs and differences. This statement shows the strength of chapter; If information from a table is needed in a result set, then that table can not be buried in a subquery- it must be in the outer query; simple but effective.

I highly recommend this book, if you are interested in learning about SQL in easy way. This book is PERFECT book for beginners and great reference for experience developers.

Rating : 4 and 1/2 stars

In Summary, This is must have book for every SQL student.

Reference : Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)