Rating: 
Summary: Terribly written, mishmash of out-dated info
Review: I thought this book should have covered SQL 7 -- it doesn't. Techniques from 4.2 and 6.5 don't do much for me. Many recent changes in TransactSQL have obsoleted many of the older techniques. I also thought the writing was boring. It reads like a text book, but isn't systematic. It bounces from topic-to-topic without explanation. Also, it gets into things barely related to TransactSQL. E.g., it talks about DBA stuff (but not in sufficient detail to really be useful) whenit should be talking about the language.
Rating: 
Summary: A great book, if slightly dated
Review: I have always used O'Reilly books when I can, because they don't have endless pages of filler material, like screenshots and repeated code listings, as many other books do. This book is no exception; it is concise and very helpful. The only reason it doesn't get five stars is because it claims to cover MS SQL 7.0 better than it does. A few of the examples need tweaking to work on 7.0, but it's nothing major. I think the succint style more than compensates and makes it better than most other bloated 800+ pages bricks out there.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is the greatest
Review: This book has saved my hide several times. I have purchased several SQL Server books, and this is the one I use most. I'm confused that so many people slammed this book - as I recommend it to everyone, and always hear appreciation for doing so. This book will make you a T-SQL guru. Keep in mind that this is a T-SQL book - not a SQL Server Administration, or Implementing DB design book! This focuses on style and language - not the database development environment. Perhaps this is why people are getting frustrated.
Rating:
Summary: Dated and sloppily thrown together
Review: I didn't get much use from this book for the following reasons: +The code is quite dated. It looks like old Sybase code for the most part. +The distinction between Sybase code and Microsoft code is often blurred, making it impossible to tell which code runs on which platform. +The text is generally hard to read and disorganized. I don't think the narrative flows logically. FWIW, a far better T-SQL book is Henderson's The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL. First and foremost, it's a great coder's book, something Klein and company could really learn from.
Rating: 
Summary: Best of a bad bunch
Review: For some reason, books on TSQl are uniformly bad, and are frequently rehashes of how to use the GUI. This isn't. Apart from some howlers, it is not a bad book, and if you're migrating from Sybase to MSSQL is a must. However, the Acknowledgement section makes the book worth buying all by itself. It is the most cringing piece of arslicking I have seen in my life.
Rating:
Summary: Severely dated, and, yes, that matters
Review: For a book that says it was published in 1999, the fact that it doesn't cover version 7.0 in any depth is simply inexcusable. Many things changed from 6.5 to 7.0 (just about everything, in fact), so a product-based book like this should definitely have covered the then-current version of the product(s). Unfortunately, it doesn't. If you follow the examples in this book, you'll write queries that: - return incorrect join results because the join criteria are specified in the WHERE clause rather than the FROM clause, as ANSI dictates - return results ordered incorrectly because they rely on the implicit ordering of the GROUP BY and UNION keywords (GROUP BY and UNION no longer guarantee an order; you must specific ORDER BY to ensure the order of a result set) - rely on out-dated optimizer characteristics and, therefore, perform poorly. Prior to 7.0, the optimizer knew how to join tables in exactly one way: through nested iterations. Now there are at least four ways that tables can be joined behind the scenes. A book like this should point out what they are and how to use/accomodate them. Especially given that its cover says that the book covers 7.0, I think we deserved more than just an appendix -- obviously an afterthought -- on 7.0. The language changed alot in 7.0, and this book should have covered that.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly organized, incongruous samples
Review: I didn't like this book for a number of reasons. I guess, overall, I'd have to say I didn't feel it lived up to the fact that it's a Nutshell book. The first problem is that it jumps from topic to topic with scarcely a reason. The organization of this book is very difficult to follow. Also, the code samples are obviously targeted at releases of SQL prior to 7.0. Old-style outer joins are used throughout the book -- a real no-no these days. Worse yet, the book isn't written very well. The prose is as uneven as it is obtuse. I think this may be due to the fact that multiple people actually wrote it -- after all, people have different writing styles. I can't recommend this book. If you're looking for the ultimate guide to Microsoft Transact-SQL, don't get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Code is very specific to 6.5 and 4.2
Review: I couldn't get many of the example routines in this book to work on MSSQL 7 or the MSSQL 2000 beta. It is really disappointing. I wrote the authors, but got no response. I know some of the problems are because the code targets old versions of the server. To me, this is not right because 7 has been released for along time now.
Rating:
Summary: Out-of-date and needlessly so
Review: I'm giving this book 1 star because there's no reason it shouldn't cover version 7.0 better than it does. SS 7.0 shouldn't be stuck away in an appendix. Moreover, the coverage of Transact-SQL as a language is quite dated, even for previous versions. Specifically: - The book shows outer joins using the antiquated *= syntax in the WHERE clause. Such joins will produce incorrect results in certain cases, as Henderson aptly points out in the first chapter of The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL. - You should not query the system tables unnecessarily. Many of the sp's and example code in this book query the system tables directly when ANSI-compliant INFORMATION_SCHEMA views exist that return the same info. - The coverage of topics is not systematic. It does not proceed logically. You get the impression that these guys took little ditties they'd written over the years and simply wrote a book around them. Coverage of the bcp command line utility, for example, does not belong in a Transact-SQL book. That's my problem. I'm sure the authors know the subject material. Unfortunately, the book indicates that their knowledge may be a bit dated.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book for programming in T-SQL
Review: This is the best book that I have seen that explains procedural T-SQL. This is for anyone trying to understand and create store procedures (including extended store procs), views, triggers, error handling, functions, (good work done on the case statement) and, tuning and optimization of the code. There are also very good examples. In addition, there is a very good section for bcp with and without format files.Very well done. I highly recommend it to any programmer that works with Sybase or MS SQL. Although other reviews complain that this is outdated THIS IS ABSOLUTLY NOT TRUE - the way you use a select, update,delete and functions never change.
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