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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Excellent on some topics, unfocused overall
There is a lot to like in this book. The chapter on database design is fantastic. The chapter on views is excellent as well. But overall the book veering off topic now and again, which adds to it's girth (760 pages.)
The book starts with a very solid introduction to stored procedures. As I say, the database design portion of the first part is probably worth the price of admission on it's own.
Part two is titled objects, which is a little deceptive since the chapter mainly covers functions, triggers, stored procedures and other structural elements.
Part three is where the book gets into XML and HTML. There is some introductory material on XML and XSL which is too brief to be a complete introduction for someone. That material is better presented in other books. But the material on XML queries direct to the SQL server is unique and valuable.
Part four on advanced topics has some good chapters. In particular the section on query optimization is well done and serves as a good introduction to the topic. But this part is where the book veers off course and into topics like testing, refactoring, XP, and an introduction to the .NET framework and C#. It's all interesting, but it's covered better in other books and the book overall could be shorter and more focused were it not for these sections.
Another downside is that Illustrations are a little underused. But the downsides aside, this is a great book, specifically for the first two parts including the excellent section on database design.
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Not useful for SQLXML
The XML coverage in this book is not useful for anyone interested in doing full blown XML development. XPATH routines and the amount of time spent on transforming and xquery are not sufficient to get beyond a beginner's stage. There are many beginners writing simple tabular represenations of a table in xml, you may be able to pull that off with this material. But any true development with browser based user input and interactive sqlxml programming simply does not exist in this book. I wish my job only required me to know what is in this book!!! I run a large healthcare IT and we are far far beyond this outdated material. In fact this book is behind the w3c standards and will not even work as shown for what little there is here. My 15 world class programmers have told me this is the last book and series they would turn to for anything. There is no reference material for any arguments or things you don't want to have to open yet another browser session for, when my guys are running 10 to 15 screens doing development. Any good book will spend the pages this one does on the "essays" of no value listing the indispensible tables of values any programmer needs at his fingertips.
Very weak on XML and SQL in general.
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Best book on SQLXML
What is really great about this book is how it tackles SQLXML wholistically--it does not assume that you already know XML and starts from ground-zero. So there is a chapter on just XML itself--nothing Sql-specific. After that it gets into each of the SQLXML pieces one-by-one--you learn them by example and by writing XML docs and code--the very best way. The book also covers many other Sql bases such as writing stored procs and all that involves--so you get the full picture. I highly recommend you read this book if--like me--you create software for Sql 2000 for a living.
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For professional developers
It's funny that no one thought of this before but the book has a message that is unique and new...writing code for Sql Server has to be approached like writing code for any other platform: as an engineering discipline. I had never heard this preached until I red this book, but am now a firm beleiver in it.
I have Henderson's other book and this one is a nice follow-up. there is naturaly some overlap between this book and the TSql book but not much. this one gets into coding conventions and version control, extended procs, design patterns and of course SqlXml...things the first book doesn't talk about. I look at this book as the big brother to the first one. It's more serious and more for the professional developer as opposed to being more of a dictionary of solutions to difficult TSql problems.
I also really liked the undocumented TSql chapter. This was my favorite chapter in Henderson's last book and this version of it has some new tricks and secrets. Just knowing about these will make you a better DBA because you will have a better understanding of what is happening under the hood.
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best book on VSS i've seen
I never got the hang of Visual sourcesafe until this book. Thank you for writing a book on this obscure topic. The other stuff in the book is outdated or just fiddle type stuff.
But with this book you can document your query and everything ni VSS. Buy it just for VSS. That's all that' really good in it.