The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

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Summary: OUT OF THIS WORLD
Review: 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.

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Summary: A great value at any price
Review: A great value at any price. This thing will teach everything you need to know about Transact SQL and then some. Read it, study it, and when you get done, do it again.

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Summary: Microsoft-Centric
Review: Yes, the fine print says "Covers Microsoft Transact-SQL". However, I would have expected any book on Transact-SQL to cover more than just the latest SQL Server incarnations. Sybase invented Transact-SQL, but there is no mention of Sybase to be found anywhere in the book.

I picked up this book based on recommendations on Amazon as an alternative to the O'Reilly book (which doesn't get very good reviews for the most part). However, we use Sybase and this book is utterly useless for anything other than recent versions of SQL Server.

Why couldn't the author have taken the time to actually cover the different major recent incarnations of Transact-SQL listing the differences? I would have rated this book much higher if the title was "Guru's Guide to Microsoft (and only Microsoft) Transact-SQL (ignoring standard/Sybase Transact-SQL)".

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Summary: Simply the best there is
Review: I recently bought this book and one titled Advanced Transact-SQL by Itzik Ben Gan. This is by far the better of the two. Compared to this book, Advanced Transact-SQL is a beginner's book. This book leaves out the BOL repeats and the strangely formatted code that takes up half a page and gets down to business quickly. The writing is crisp, witty, and will keep you engaged -- not an easy task for a book like this. I've read some good technical books in my time, but this is by far the best, SQL or otherwise.

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Summary: Lived up to the hype.
Review: Sometimes when a book has been given a high rating by an over whelming number of people, my inclination is to be a little suspicious. However, this book is worth every penny. I learned something almost immediately reading this book. What I liked most about this book is the fact that you do not have to read one chapter to understand another one. The examples in this book do work, and I have used a few as a guide to real life problems. Overall, I thought that this book is one of the best T-SQL books out there. If you want to improve your T-SQL skills you can spend the $... bucks for this book, or take a $2000+ class. This the best book on the market for T-SQL period.

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Summary: The definitive word on Transact-SQL
Review: I am a SQL Server trainer based in New York. We buy all the books that come out on SQL Server and evaluate them for classroom use. This book is hands-down the best book money can buy on Transact-SQL and maybe even on SQL Server. My take on the other Transact-SQL books:

Teach Yourself Transact-SQL (both versions) - too shallow and too disorganized to teach you anything in 21 months, let alone 21 days

Transact-SQL (Amo) - nearly everything in it is in the Books Online. It is also quite dated.

Transact-SQL Programming (Klein, et al) - Very dated (SQL Server 2000 is not covered at all and SQL Server 7.0 is relegated to an appendix) and gets off into topics that have nothing to do with Transact-SQL (for example, the bcp utility). It was unfortunately the best of the lot until the Guru's Guide came out.

Advanced Transact-SQL Programming (Moreau, et al) - Not advanced at all - really just a rehash of the Books Online. Examples have numerous flaws. Recommends techniques that MS has deprecated. Book is a difficult read because of obvious problems with English on the part of the authors.

SQL for Smarties (Celko) - not a Transact-SQL book, per se, but we looked at using it to teach ANSI-compliant Transact-SQL since it purports to teach ANSI syntax. The problem with it is that 1) the examples are loaded with errors 2) many of the examples (and recommendations) come straight from academia - they aren't applicable to the real world. People who come to us for training usually want to learn something that will help them do their jobs better. This book doesn't really do that.

So, there you have it: our brief survey of the available Transact-SQL books. Given the competition, Henderson's book easily walks away as the best Transact-SQL book your money can buy. It is practical, well-written, and loaded with great examples and good advice. The parts we use most are:

Cursors chapter - shows how to properly use cursors to solve complex problems.

Concurrency chapter - shows how to design Transact-SQL code to deal with locking/blocking/concurrency issues. Explains locking in detail and explains how to use it to your advantage.

SELECT chapter - all you ever wanted to know about SELECT and more.

Statistics chapters - these gems show how to solve hard row-positioning problems with Transact-SQL code that will actually work in the real world.

Administrative chapter - most of our students are DBAs who want to know how to do their jobs better. This chapter not only includes lots of useful code that you can drop into place in production environments, it also reveals a lot about how SQL Server works internally. It's probably our most popular lesson.

Stored procedures - DBAs usually wind up writing a fair number of stored procedures, so this chapter has also proved very popular.

Performance and Tuning - this chapter could be its own book. It's crammed full of useful techniques for speeding up slow Transact-SQL code. It's my personal favorite.

Full-text search - Since its addition in SQL Server 7.0, this topic has garnered a lot of interest from our students. We've used Henderson's Full-Text chapter to teach FTS from soup to nuts.

In our opinion, this is the best Transact-SQL book money can buy. It's also the best SQL book of any kind out there - it's more useful than books like Celko's because the 600+ examples in it actually work :-) And it may even be the best SQL Server book around. Though we also like and use books like Inside SQL Server 2000 and various others from Microsoft, this book stands apart from them because of how well written it is. We've had students who weren't even SQL Server people comment on what an easy read the prose is.

The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL is exactly what its title implies: the definitive word on Transact-SQL written by a master of the language.

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Summary: Absolutely loaded with great commentary and examples
Review: I've bought all the other TSQL books and this one is by far the best of the lot. There's just no comparison. The thing is absolutely loaded with great commentary and examples.

A lot of SQL Server books spend their pages (and your time) just repeating the Books Online. Henderson doesn't do that. He starts where the BOL ends and takes you to the next level.

There's something about a book that goes into such detail and yet features such readable, friendly prose. The book is unlike any that I have ever read.

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Summary: Worth every penny
Review: I like how full of info this book is. There isn't a single TSQL subject that's not covered completely. Everything from great tricks to best practices is in it. And yet the book isn't that physically large - it's just really dense. I've seen books that were twice as long with half the info. I find myself rereading different parts of because they're so loaded with good stuff. Definitely worth the money.

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Summary: The best book I've found
Review: I've read every SQL Server book I could get my hands on and none compare to this one. The sheer clarity of the text, the ind-depth explanations, the friendly prose -- all combine to produce the best book available on SQL Server.

Equally as amazing is the usefulness of the sample code. I don't know about you, but sample code from most of the books I've found tends to be more academic than practical. In other words, though it helps explain some important point, it's not code you could or would use in the real wrold. That's not true with this book. Everything - from the fulltext search examples, to the Automation and Administrative code - is good stuff. I used lots of it in my job as-is. So, you get a double value here. You get a great book, and along with it, a great T-SQL code library. They ought to sell the CD separately.

Last but not least - I love the T-SQL editor that's included with the book. It's a freebie tool (they're not hawking a product here) that's much more powerful and easy to use than Query Analyzer. So, you get a triple value.

All told, this is one heckuva book (and software package). Knowing what I know now, if I was told I had to get rid of all my SQL Server books except one, this is the one I'd keep.

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Summary: GREAT BOOK!!!
Review: 600 code samples? What does that tell you? It tells you that the book is what it says it is: a coder's book. If you want to learn to code in Transact-SQL, this is this book for you. It doesn't waste paper or trees by cataloging what the Books Online already tells you. It tells you what the BOL leaves out and takes you beyond just learning syntax to solving real world problems. The book is really a cookbook of solutions to hard Transact-SQL problems. Not only is it a great SQL Server book, it is one of the best solutions books ever written.