Rating: 
Summary: Examples, Examples, and More Examples
Review: "SQL Queries for Mere Mortals" focuses on how to think about and create SQL queries to answer real-world questions. It covers the database design issues you need to understand in order to write SQL queries, but it doesn't try to be a design book. It doesn't talk about creating a database, inserting, updating, deleting data, or about performance tuning. In short, this book lives up to its title and focuses only on SQL queries.This book is full of examples of how to take questions and turn them into SQL queries, plus explanations of why and when to use the various SQL capabilities. The examples focus on standard SQL. While your SQL implementation may support slightly different syntax, the examples provided in the book serve as a useful base for understanding the power and complexity of SQL. If you are just learning SQL, or you have been using it for a while and need to enhance your SQL skills, you will find this book very useful.
Rating:
Summary: Examples, Examples, and More Examples
Review: "SQL Queries for Mere Mortals" focuses on how to think about and create SQL queries to answer real-world questions. It covers the database design issues you need to understand in order to write SQL queries, but it doesn't try to be a design book. It doesn't talk about creating a database, inserting, updating, deleting data, or about performance tuning. In short, this book lives up to its title and focuses only on SQL queries. This book is full of examples of how to take questions and turn them into SQL queries, plus explanations of why and when to use the various SQL capabilities. The examples focus on standard SQL. While your SQL implementation may support slightly different syntax, the examples provided in the book serve as a useful base for understanding the power and complexity of SQL. If you are just learning SQL, or you have been using it for a while and need to enhance your SQL skills, you will find this book very useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Just for Beginners
Review: After reading a few pages of the book, I was really disappointed. This book is too easy. If you have ever written any sql statement, you probably need not this book.
But if you don't know anything about sql, it explains sql very easy way with many similar examples. :-)
Rating:
Summary: Really query what you want
Review: After reading this book I finally understood table relationships and how to retrieve the information I wanted from multiple tables at once. I have never had queries put across in such a clear simple manner. I had been working with ASP / SQL queries for about a year and was just muddling through with sub-tables and linking. I was creating databases with redundant information just so I didn't have to link tables. This book allowed me to streamline my database and improve the speed and simplicity of my ASP pages. This book focuses on select queries almost exclusively, but this is I think a strong point not a weakness, since most of the time you are pulling information out not inserting or updating. Works very well with it's companion book Database design for mere mortals
Rating: 
Summary: Very good but flawed
Review: First, I have to say that I liked this book very much. It is clear and to the point. The examples and excercises are also extremely helpful. I particularly like the fact that they include several very different sorts of databases on the attached CD ROM. There are two things that keep me from giving it the full five stars. The first problem is that the autthors introduce a method for converting requests in english into SQL queries that is next to useless. It starts with a request for data (in english) and proceeds to a "translation" into something like SQL. Finally you are supposed to convert the translation into valid SQL by "cleaning it up" (i.e. deleting extraneous words). However, there is no explanation of how you get from the request to the "translation". Luckily this method is not necessary to follow the otherwise well thought out explanations in the book. The second problem is that the excercises in the book don't work out the way they are supposed to (i.e. the number of rows returned by the query is not always the number of rows they tell you it is supposed to return). This is because the excercise databases are slightly different than the solution databases. This caused me plenty of headaches trying to debug my SQL until I discovered the problem. Even with these problems, this is the best beginners book on the subject I've yet come across.
Rating:
Summary: Very good but flawed
Review: First, I have to say that I liked this book very much. It is clear and to the point. The examples and excercises are also extremely helpful. I particularly like the fact that they include several very different sorts of databases on the attached CD ROM. There are two things that keep me from giving it the full five stars. The first problem is that the autthors introduce a method for converting requests in english into SQL queries that is next to useless. It starts with a request for data (in english) and proceeds to a "translation" into something like SQL. Finally you are supposed to convert the translation into valid SQL by "cleaning it up" (i.e. deleting extraneous words). However, there is no explanation of how you get from the request to the "translation". Luckily this method is not necessary to follow the otherwise well thought out explanations in the book. The second problem is that the excercises in the book don't work out the way they are supposed to (i.e. the number of rows returned by the query is not always the number of rows they tell you it is supposed to return). This is because the excercise databases are slightly different than the solution databases. This caused me plenty of headaches trying to debug my SQL until I discovered the problem. Even with these problems, this is the best beginners book on the subject I've yet come across.
Rating:
Summary: Good but...
Review: Good book but should point out the differences with Access, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and other database servers. This book is about the SQL standard, which is good, but a lot of things can't be used in real life. Overall, a very good book though!
Rating: 
Summary: No one on my job found this book useful
Review: i am a java programmer. I found this book sitting around on the shelf at work, and i tried to read it, but it was really bad. I needed a reference and this book did not have solutions to the problems I had. Later i tried to read it as a tutorial, but it failed there too. i said "this book sucks!" and someone saw what book i was reading and laughed at me. Then all the other programmers saw me reading it and laughed, too. Aparently the book belonged to someone who quit the company and wanted nothing further to do with it, and it's been usless and confusing to everyone since -- and everyone discovers this fact sooner or later. everyone one day finds it and goes "this book sucks!" and everyone else laughs to see yet another person discover The Useless and Confusing Book! After they were done laughing at me a couple of them threw their sql books on my desk, and those were very helpful. get some generic sql reference for the commands and a basic tutorial to understand the language and you will be all set for life. even the title -- "for mere mortals" -- what the heck does the mean? you need to be a god to write sql, and here is un-godly sql? that makes no sense! what's the use of "mere mortal" sql then? i'm sure if you got nothing else this book can work but there are many better ones around. look around.
if you're too lazy to look around, get an O'Riley book! those are usually good -- I mean O'Riley books are far better than average -- but there always are books much better than O'Riley.
Rating:
Summary: Do not reccomend.
Review: I bought this book based on its high popularity and ranking. I feel that the ranking is not true of this books potential. I have developed an Access database, but I am not a db developer. I wanted a a basic book which would show me examples of update, insert, delete queries etc. This book does not even mention about basic queries like delete, insert, update leave alone make table etc. Whats the point of a book about "Queries" if you mention only about select querries. I would not recommend this book at all.
Rating:
Summary: No longer a mere mortal
Review: I develop programs with Microsoft Access 97 & 2000, as part of of the development process I create many queries using the QBE grid, unfortunaltely I found that I was often very restricted and was not able to get the query to function and produce the results I wanted, I was not well versed in SQL, then I discovered SQL Queries for Mere Mortals. I have not finished the book yet but it has proved an invaluable tool. By applying some of the techniques that I learned in just the first half of the book I was able to use the information to edit my Access Queries and produce the results I wanted. Since then I have taken some SQL classes with more planed in the future, I also just purchased SQL 2000 Server Administrators Kit and Data Mininng. I thank the authors of this book for getting me started. This is an excelent place to get your feet wet and wet your appetite for more SQL (2 thumbs up!!)
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