Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I have bought many computer books and it is always a thrill to stumble on a book that throughly explains a subject. This book has excellent examples and very easy to read. The free trial softwares are also great. In fact, I bought the book for the free software, but I got an added bonus in that the book is also excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I needed to come up to speed quickly on SQL. This book served as an excellent learning tool, then later as an excellent reference. I found the explainations and examples very clear and concise. The organization of the book was clear and allowed me to focus on the areas of SQL I needed to know most. Don't let the thickness of the book scare you, you can easily pick and choose your chapters and it reads quickly.I tried another SQL book prior to reading this one, and found it complex and confusing.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult to understand
Review: I purchased this book because it had a CD-Rom;however, the passwords and user names are not given to use to access the databases and the book does not give you the information. If you are looking for a book that offers SQL for Oracle. Oracle8i The Complete Reference is what I would recommend. The examples this book gives are not clearly defined. I had a difficult time understanding this book.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult to understand
Review: I purchased this book because it had a CD-Rom;however, the passwords and user names are not given to use to access the databases and the book does not give you the information. If you are looking for a book that offers SQL for Oracle. Oracle8i The Complete Reference is what I would recommend. The examples this book gives are not clearly defined. I had a difficult time understanding this book.
Rating:
Summary: The best computer reference book I've ever read
Review: I was forced to buy this book for a database class. I didn't fully appreciate it until I took a programming job and found myself using SQL quite a bit. This book lives up to its name, as it is truly a complete listing of all the concepts in SQL. It gives quality examples of how to use embedded SQL, dynamic SQL, and standard SQL. The authors are to be commended as this book is truly easy to read and quite informative. If you are interested at all in working with database programming, I can't recommend this SQL book high enough!! Plus, there is software included on the CD for many DBMS (Oracle, SQL Server, and others), which makes this book a good value.
Rating:
Summary: Read the title of the book....
Review: I'm the next person to truly recommend this book. Buy it, keep it and take care of it. You'll always have a peek at it, because who can really remember everything about SQL? The best bit about the book is that it is really written using Standard SQL (ANSI). (It does supply some additional information about other specific SQL language differences) This is one of those books I'd loved to have had during the long time-consuming quest of learning SQL. It would have saved tons of time and a lot of frustration.
Rating:
Summary: SELECT * FROM this one
Review: If you aim to be a DBA the first thing you should do , before reading a specific DB Vendor book, is to read something about general database aspects like data integrity, security, performance etc.
This one does the job. After reading the book I was quickly able to dive into Oracle ( and now a DBA ).
But ( a commercial trick ) the book doesn't provide ( as promised in cover ) is detailed information on every main DB brand. But we all know this is not possible within a book, even at this size.
Tough, who cares?
Rating:
Summary: Indepth, with complete coverage.
Review: Super book for beginning to advanced SQL. I was able to teach myself SQL from this book in conjunction with another, called The Practical SQL Handbook.
Rating: 
Summary: Sort Of Complete
Review: The 'complete' reference leaves out some minor details like how to access databases, what associations to apply to them, how to use the software (even a minor indication would be nice - I know how to click .exe). And there's the little detail of not being supplied passwords to USE the software, and of course no web sight faq source or any way to contact the authors) If you're starting out this complete reference isn't quite complete enough
Rating: 
Summary: Disapponting re-package
Review: The book is merely a re-package of the first edition; and what makes things worse - none of the errors of the first one were ever fixed:(it still claims, for instance that Oracle's stored procedures params must be declared as VARCHAR(10) - i.e. it must be sized; such syntax could not possibly compile),some examples do not compile..... Appendix shows installation of Informix,DB2 UDB 5.2, Oracle 8 and MS SQL Server 7.0 - from the first edition,while this second edition's disk includes only SQL Server 2000, DB2 7.1 and MySQL; this had undermined my trust in the "up-to-date content", claimed by the preface and the cover. As in the previous edition, it concentrates on the standard SQL, much of which has nothing to do with implementations (e.g. DOMAIN keyword). Chapter on functions lists 7, 9 (?)functions - out of hundreds implemented by RDBMS!
To be true, the book was spiced up with several new chapters on XML, EJB etc - a mile wide, an inch deep in coverage...I'd be better off buying separate books on the subject. I wish I could return it. If you cannot avoid it - buy the first edition and save tens of dollars; or - better yet - look for a different book.
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