IT programming books related reviews
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
I have over ten years of experience in the database profession. Henderson's books are the best I have seen for any dbms. I bought all three of them around Christmas time and have been poring over them since then. This book taught me how to write industrial strength programs for Sql Server. Who would have thought that the query language had this much power? The chapters on set operations, hiearchys and arrays showed me dozens of different ways of solving problems that I would have previously thought were unsolvable without pulling the data back to the client and working with it there. Being able to do all these things on the server makes applications simpler and faster.The money I paid for this and Henderson's other books is the best money I have spent on computer books in a long, long time. Very highly recommended.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael J. Corey, Michael Abbey, Ian Abramson, Larry Barnes, Benjamin Taub, Rajan Venkitachalam
Rating: 1/5
Title: SQL Server 7 Data Warehousing
Publisher: Osborne Publishing
Authors: Michael J. Corey, Michael Abbey, Ian Abramson, Larry Barnes, Benjamin Taub, Rajan Venkitachalam
Rating: 1/5
This is an introduction to Data Warehousing, but does not talk about the details of the MS SQL Server OLAP Services or how to implement them efficiently. I was extremely disappointed. I think the problem was this book might have came out too soon, before someone really had a chance to examine the product and since I really wanted to learn Plato (Microsoft OLAP Server), I bought the book right away.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 2/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 2/5
I remember SQL Server 4.2 and 6.5 well enough to know that this was a good book in its time. Problem is, 7.0 has been out for over a year and SQL 2000 is on the horizon. This book is woefully out of date. It queries system tables (in the first place, you shouldn't do that unless absolutely necessary) that don't even exist anymore (e.g., sysprocedures). It uses old-style joins throughout, despite the fact that they've been deprecated by Microsoft, Soukup&Delaney, Henderson, and many others. Last but not least, it *claims* 7.0 coverage, but does not deliver. A perfunctory appendix on 7.0 does not constitute SQL Server 7.0 coverage.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 1/5
Title: Transact-SQL Programming
Publisher: O'Reilly
Authors: Lee Gould, Andrew Zanevsky, Kevin Kline
Rating: 1/5
For a book that says it was published in 1999, the fact that it doesn't cover version 7.0 in any depth is simply inexcusable. Many things changed from 6.5 to 7.0 (just about everything, in fact), so a product-based book like this should definitely have covered the then-current version of the product(s). Unfortunately, it doesn't. If you follow the examples in this book, you'll write queries that:- return incorrect join results because the join criteria are specified in the WHERE clause rather than the FROM clause, as ANSI dictates- return results ordered incorrectly because they rely on the implicit ordering of the GROUP BY and UNION keywords (GROUP BY and UNION no longer guarantee an order; you must specific ORDER BY to ensure the order of a result set)- rely on out-dated optimizer characteristics and, therefore, perform poorly. Prior to 7.0, the optimizer knew how to join tables in exactly one way: through nested iterations. Now there are at least four ways that tables can be joined behind the scenes. A book like this should point out what they are and how to use/accomodate them.Especially given that its cover says that the book covers 7.0, I think we deserved more than just an appendix -- obviously an afterthought -- on 7.0. The language changed alot in 7.0, and this book should have covered that.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 5/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 5/5
I picked up a number of PHP and MySQL books along with this one and find myself using this one the most. If you already know how to program in another language and want to get up to speed fast on PHP and MySQL this is the book you need. Some issues I ran into I could not find the answer anywhere in other books or on the web, then I grabbed this book as a last resort and wa-la the answer was there. Now this is the first book I look for answers to questions in.If you just need a little examples of how to do things in PHP and MySQL this book does it.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
I looked at many, many SQL programming books but this is the one I always turn to when I have a programming question. It is very informative and, hands down, the best out there.Technical books are usually very dry, but this one explains programming concepts well with excellent examples that are easy to follow and implement into a T-SQL program.This book has most definately made me a much better programmer. I started off barely able to write a decent and effective SELECT statement and now I feel like I can do anything with this book and the Microsoft SQL Help File. This book does not cover database design or administration, so if you don't know anything about databases then you might want to start with a beginner's book and then move up to this book later on.No doubt, this is a very highly recommended book.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook
Publisher: Digital Press
Authors: Ken England
Rating: 2/5
Title: The Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook
Publisher: Digital Press
Authors: Ken England
Rating: 2/5
This book contains very clear introductions on how SQL server 2000 works, what are the important design considerations for creating a database, and has tutorials on the various tuning tools. As an introduction on SQL Server workings, it is very good. However, it is also very light on how to actually monitor and tune a real system. The tuning checklist is generic and many of the items are only applicable to designers, not someone who administers databases that may have been in existance for years. If you read the entire book, you can pick out handy items, but it does not give tuning examples, does not tell when to get concerned over particular parameters, nor go into which parameters (from the many supplied by the performance monitor) are really the important ones. As such, I did not find it much help in my daily activities as a DBA. I found "SQL Server 2000 for Experienced DBAs" by Brian Knight to be much more helpful.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Chris Fehily
Rating: 5/5
Title: SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Authors: Chris Fehily
Rating: 5/5
Anyone who uses SQL regularly knows that it's absolutely critical to understand nulls - you can't write SQL programs or interpret results without mastering them. In most of the SQL books that I've read, nulls are mentioned once near the beginning and not given much screen time afterwards - perhaps popping up in an example here and there. This book takes the different (and welcome) approach of weaving the implications of nulls throughout the entire text. In addition to null rudiments, this book addresses crucial issues such as detecting and counting nulls, how nulls give rise to three-value logic (true/false/unknown), when nulls are considered to be duplicates and when they aren't, substituting actual values for nulls and vice versa, how nulls sort, how nulls propagate through computations, which functions ignore nulls and which don't, how nulls affect joins, and how nulls cause problems in subqueries. The book also contains specific tips for Oracle, which (for some reason) considers empty strings to be nulls.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Ken Henderson
Rating: 5/5
THE BOOK IS SIMPLY OUT OF THIS WORLD. I WISH ALL TECH BOOKS WERE LIKE THIS. IT HAS MORE DETAIL THAN YOU CAN READ. AND ITS WRITTEN EXTREMELY WELL. HEREIN YOU WILL FIND ALL YOU COULD ASK FOR ABOUT TSQL. REGARDLESS WHETHER YOU WORK WITH MICROSOFT OR SYBASE - LEARNING THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU AN EXPERT.
Product: Book Paperback
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
Title: Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Publisher: Sams
Authors: Julie C. Meloni
Rating: 1/5
This book was exasperating to use. It described easy topics at length while leaving important details murky or omitted altogether. Many commmands and structures are described out of context, leaving you with little idea of *why* a person might use a particular form. It doesn't try to put the ideas together into a unified application until the end.
Much better is _PHP and MySQL Web Development_ by Welling and Thomson, which introduces concepts in the context of building an e-commerce site. Even though it is longer than the SAMS book, the writing is tighter, more concise, better organized, and generally much easier to understand.
