Rating: 
Summary: Wish I'd had these books 5 years ago
Review: I own all three of Ken Henderson's SQL Server books. They stand apart from the rest of the crowd as the best books available on their respective subjects. Henderson takes a fresh approach to teaching that other authors would do well to emulate. What do I mean exactly? I mean this: Every point of any significance that is raised is illustrated with code when possible. There are hundreds of code examples in each of Henderson's books - many times what you usually see in DBA or programming books. No details are glosssed over. If you really want to know how something works or what the best approach is to doing something, you need these books. Another thing that is great about these books is how easy to read they are. Complex subjects are regularly broached with explanations and teaching that practically anyone could understand. Topics that trip up other authors or that they skip altogether are discussed in terms that anyone can grasp. It is difficult to convey just how important this is, but suffice it to say that the books are simply easy to read. If you want to know SQL Server at an expert level, you need look no further. Get all three of Henderson's books and read them cover-to-cover.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book.
Review: I have been working as a programmer for 15+ years. I find this book to be an excellent balance of theory and practicality. I appreciate a writer who can give me an honest opinion, independent of the corporate party line, without taking a negative view of the product. I personally find this book to be much more readable than your average technical manual and it seems (to me) to indicate a depth of knowledge not readily demonstrated by most other authors who seem mostly to paraphrase the rather clinical books-on-line. I found this book to be so helpful that I have purchased his other books on Architecture and Transact-SQL. Before I purchased this book, I read several negative reviews, and was grateful for them. They convinced me beforehand (correctly) that this was the type of book I was looking for. If you are looking for a book with explicit solutions to every permutation of a problem, with code examples of how to solve "your specific" problem, this may not be your book. To me, those tend to fall under the heading of "give a man a fish" versus "teaching a man to fish". When I purchased this book, I was looking for a book that would explain things in a way that would let me know the ins-and-outs of this technology, showing me which things work, and more importantly which don't. I have found chapter 3, "Common Design Patterns" to be an outstanding resource should be required reading for developers learning to write SQL "code".
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: After reading the first book (The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL), I was anxious to pick up a copy of this book. Realizing that the first book was a masterpiece, I picked up this book expecting a good book, but nothing that special. In all honesty I didn't believe this book would be able to compare to the first one. After all, how could one follow up a book like that. I was wrong! This book was just as good as the first one, and made me realize that there are writers out there who are as passionate about writing tech books as I am about software engineering. After reading this book I contacted the author via e-mail, not about a programming issue, but about a work environment issue. He was gracious enough to take the time to respond. I will be purchasing the next book that Ken writes. If you wish to improve your knowledge I would recommend this book as well as the first one.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: I liked the book because it is so well-written and so comprehensive. It is rare that you find a book that is a good read and still loaded with technical How-To. How do I know the book is well-written... I know because I find myself having trouble putting it down. I enjoy just reading it. The forward says it all. I too wish this book had existed about ten years ago. I could have really used it. I too think it reads like an experienced developer sharing his experiences. These are words of wisdom from someone who has been there. This is a great book. If you work with Sql Server you will learn something useful from this book. You will probably also find some scripts or procedures that you can use in your own work.
Rating:
Summary: Great compliment to Henderson's first book
Review: If you liked Henderson's first Guru's Guide book you will like this one as well. It has the same tone and same in depth coverage of useful topics. The Data Volumes chapter was a real pleasure to read. The data doubling trick was worth the cost of the book all by itself. We switched to using it in our test suites and they sped up by 50%! The chapter on Automation was also priceless. I love the sp_diffdb proc. I've needed to check two databases for schema differences many times over the years, but never had a tool for doing it. Now I get a free one with this book. That is some kind of value. I also loves the Guru's Guide VSS tool. We use Visual SourceSafe in our shop, so this tool that integrates Query Analyzer with VSS was a godsend. The .NET coverage was really eye-opening. You can tell the guy has definitely been there. If you had the first Guru's Guide book get this one too. You won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: Thorough and innovative
Review: The basic message of this book is one we would all do well to learn: that t-sql is a real language and you have to work at like any other language to be good at it. The book is a great mix of expert instruction and great code that you can put to use. For example, the xp_exec xproc lets you run any code you want from a user-defined function (UDF). That is huge. At the same time, the chapter on query performance is a great tour through the internals of the query processor. The chapters on sql-xml are a great combination of the two - thorough instruction and great code samples. This is a theme you will find throughout the book. I liked the essays at the end of the book, too. Particularly the one on the need for testing was great. The mixing of personal experiences with technical info was done just right. You get a very thorough book and one that is chalk-full of innovative code. It would be a bargain at ten times the price. Jim F.
Rating:
Summary: You need this book
Review: Some might question whether they need a separate book on stored procedure coding. Trust me, you do. The book goes through one aspect after another of how to develop stored procedures for SQL Server. It differs from other books in that it treats T-SQL like a real language. It posits that you need to apply design patterns to you work, that you need to test it, and that it needs the same type of source code management as any other language. This book is different from other T-SQL and stored procedure books for this very reason. It approaches the language from the perspective of a professional developer. As Ron Soukup says in the forward this is a masterful guide written by a master coder. You can learn from this the same way I did. The writing is detailed, flows well, and extremely technical. Add to this the great SQL-XML info and HTML chapter and you have a book no SQL Server developer should be without.
Rating:
Summary: Loved the stored proc info
Review: After reading Henderson's first Guru's Guide book I thought I knew all I needed to know about T-sql and stored proc creation. I was wrong. This book has proved invaluable to learning about developing stored procs apart from just knowing how to solve difficult T-sql problems. I loved the chapter on version control. I have been wondering how to manage all of my stored proc code, and this chapter gave me some great tips on how to do that. The tools that show how to integrate with Visual Source Safe are a real gem. The chapter on design patterns was a great one too. I never considered applying design patterns to T-sql. After I read this, I had a whole new way of looking at code, especially other people's code. Things seemed to jump out at me that I never noticed before. I really liked the extended procs chapter, too. I have been wondering how these things worked for years now. Now I not only know that, I can even write my own. I have been wanting to know how to build something like xp_setPriority for some time now. Now I have code I can simply drop in place. This book takes you beyond Henderson's first book and straight into professional first class stored proc development. If you build applications based on Sql Server you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Thank you thank you thank you
Review: The chapter on arrays in this book saved my life. They literally gave me a whole new way of solving certain kinds of problems. fn_createarray? fn_setarray? Way, way cool. The extended procedures in this book alone are worth the cost. xp_setpriority is ingeniously clever. And so are many, many others. sp_generate_script and many others deserve a place in your code library. If you are looking for a treasure chest of great code and examples you needn't look any further - this is your book.
Rating:
Summary: Great XML coverage
Review: The intro to XML in this book is the best one I've seen. In one chapter I went from not knowing anything about XML to how to build some pretty complex documents and style sheets. I appreciate the thought that went into including the intro. Although it is not about SQLXML specifically it helps you understand the SQLXML chapters later in the book. The SQLXML chapters build on the earlier XML info and helped me get going with SQL Server's XML features. I was especially fond of the templates coverage. These are pretty cool and Henderson explains them in terms anyone could understand. Something that was also great to read was the .Net chapter. It convinced me that I needed to get into this more than I have.
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