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Summary: It will teach you SQL real good ...
Review: ... as this book did to me if you are new to SQL or want to freshen up
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Summary: Broad coverage of SQL3 at a basic level
Review: Advertised as being for beginners, the authors land right on target. The coverage is also of sufficient breadth to cover all of the major points of SQL and the prose style is clear and concise. In terms of difficulty, it is in the proper location, above those with the equivalent of dumb in the title and below those that assume previous programming experience.
While several implementations of SQL are mentioned, the emphasis is on Oracle and MySQL. The choice of a major commercial and an open source implementation of SQL was a wise one and broadens the audience. In the cases where there are differences, they are clearly marked by an icon. Commands from the latest SQL standard, SQL3 are also covered, making it as up to date as possible.
This is a sound introduction to SQL and is the best quick start guide to the language that I have seen on the market recently.
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Summary: Use this book with care.
Review: As usual for this series, lays out stuff step by step. Problem here is that the explanations are often unclear, or even nonexistent. Plus, there's a lot of typos and other errors, in the examples, and in the quiz/exercise sections. I can't find an errata list online, and the publisher didn't answer my query. An experienced person can figure out the errors, but a real beginner might be very confused. I wouldn't depend on this to be my first or only guide to SQL.
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Summary: Well written, but too Oracle specific
Review: Enjoyed this book, and the lessons are very straight-forward, but the majority of the code supplied is pretty Oracle-specific. I had a devil of a time getting the code to work in a Microsoft environment (SQL Server or Access 97).As a beginner, I actually found Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes by Ben Forta to be a better book. Forta provides notes on what will and won't work in what programs. Overall, this book was helpful, and it will probably remain a useful reference edition. But if I were going to choose again, I'd get the 10 minute version first.
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Summary: It took less than 24 hours!
Review: First of all, I have the second edition, and it has no typos,nor is it Oracle-oriented. Plain ANSI SQL. I needed to learn SQLvery fast while starting from scratch. I have been computing for 35 years, but never dealt with SQL, believe it or not. This book is very well organized. It assumes no prior knowledge. It starts with simple concepts, and leads you to complete understanding and mastery of SQL in no time. It says 24 hours, but it took me less. END
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Summary: Excellent way to learn SQL
Review: Having been babied by Access for years, I knew that I needed to get more into SQL itself if I wanted to successfully move to SQL Server or any other platform. This book was easy to use, has a good index (which seems rare in computer books these days) and hits all the important points about SQL that you need to know. The process is step-by-step, and the steps are logically organized. It provides information about multiple platforms, including syntax for Sybase, SQL Server, and Oracle, where necessary. Its nice to see a book that's not product-centered. There's also an excellent quick reference at the back of the book that I have permanently bookmarked and refer to it constantly when I need reminding about syntax. Haven't found a better SQL book yet, and this one is the go-to SQL book for our team.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Many Mistakes
Review: I came to this book with a very basic working knowledge of SQL, hoping to round out my knowledge of more complex operations and get a better grasp of transactional operations. I came away with little more than I started with. The authors take such a broad approach, attempting to do the impossible - teach readers how to use ANSI-compliant SQL. Problem is, no RDBMS (Database platform) is truly ANSI-compliant. When it gets specific it's generally to show how MySQL does not do what Oracle does, yet for some strange reason they instruct the reader to use MySQL for exercises. Even funnier, something like 20% of the exercises cannot be done on MySQL, so they actually suggest that you get out a piece of paper and write them out! Why not just write a book called "Oracle SQL" and offer some comparisons with other implementations? The "see your implementation documentation for details" disclaimer occurs 2-3 times per chapter. So, why am I reading this again? Why not just read my RDBMS help files? In the same vein, the data provided to learn with is exemplary of "toy" code, with tables of 5-10 records each. Most chapters consist of run-downs of the various functions, sometimes with good examples, often without. The typos are rampant, with whole blocks of text sometimes being misplaced. Even the source data contains egregious errors. Obviously, this book was slammed out (in "24 hours" I bet), was not proofread, and forgotten. Third edition?!? Was the first edition just a bunch of garbled text?? I could go on, but in summary, don't bother. Buy something else. Anything else. Most likely either a book aimed at a particular implementation (e.g. MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgresSQL etc), or one of the many books aimed at giving a working knowledge of SQL for web development (e.g. PHP and MySQL Web Development, etc). Good luck.
Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I came to this book with a very basic working knowledge of SQL, hoping to round out my knowledge of more complex operations and get a better grasp of transactional operations. I came away with little more than I started with. The authors take such a broad approach, attempting to do the impossible - teach readers how to use ANSI-compliant SQL. Problem is, no RDBMS (Database platform) is truly ANSI-compliant. When it gets specific it's generally to show how MySQL does not do what Oracle does, yet for some strange reason they instruct the reader to use MySQL for exercises. Even funnier, something like 20% of the exercises cannot be done on MySQL, so they actually suggest that you get out a piece of paper and write them out! Why not just write a book called "Oracle SQL" and offer some comparisons with other implementations? The "see your implementation documentation for details" disclaimer occurs 2-3 times per chapter. So, why am I reading this again? Why not just read my RDBMS help files? In the same vein, the data provided to learn with is exemplary of "toy" code, with tables of 5-10 records each. Most chapters consist of run-downs of the various functions, sometimes with good examples, often without. The typos are rampant, with whole blocks of text sometimes being misplaced. Even the source data contains egregious errors. Obviously, this book was slammed out (in "24 hours" I bet), was not proofread, and forgotten. Third edition?!? Was the first edition just a bunch of garbled text?? I could go on, but in summary, don't bother. Buy something else. Anything else. Most likely either a book aimed at a particular implementation (e.g. MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgresSQL etc), or one of the many books aimed at giving a working knowledge of SQL for web development (e.g. PHP and MySQL Web Development, etc). Good luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Badly organized
Review: I have a solid knowldege of conceptual data modelling but had no knowledge of SQL. This book, although containing the required information, is very badly organized. Examples are given before you can try them out, since you build the tables at a later stage. The "hour" discussing normalization is simply misleading and shows an example completely unrelated to the normalization rule it is supposed to apply. I used Oracle SQL and found that a lot of the examples didn't work in Oracle SQL environment. Maybe it takes less than 24 hours (I agree, it takes much less) but the time it takes is very frustrating. I simply didn't enjoy learning with this book.
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Summary: not very good (2nd Edition)
Review: I have to believe that anyone who read this book and claimed that it was free of typos either doesn't know how to read or didn't learn a thing. This book is so filled with typos that I wouldn't have learned a thing if this weren't the second book that I have read on SQL and help from a friend of mine. The typos were not of the missing comma sort, they were entirely missing joins in statements that wouldn't work without them, wrong answers in the answer key, answers to questions that weren't even asked and a bucket full of missing semi-colons. This book is clearly a very beginner book it basically touches (and when I mean touches, I mean it lightly caresses) just about everything. Another thing that I couldn't understand is the way the author wouldn't tie the examples together. In one statment you create a new temp table in the next statment you are deleting a temp table but it has a different name and you never created that table to begin with.
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