Rating: 
Summary: Good book for those who know some SQL already
Review: The only reason this book doesn't get 5 stars is because of its 50,000 errors. There seems to be some sort of error on every page. Fire the editor and you have yourself a 5 star book
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent beginner book on SQL!!
Review: This book does a great job of teaching beginning to intermediate SQL syntax. Also covered in the text are more advanced topics such as dynamic SQL, stored procedures, and interactive SQL. The book does not come with a disk/CD to load the tables. However, I found creating the tables myself to be extremely instructional. Yes, there are some typos, but this too is instructional from a debugging standpoint. Also, the syntax used for most of the examples are Oracle's implementation of SQL. Overall, I'd like to say, "Great job, guys!" I'm now ready to take the next small step towards mastery of SQL and eventual Oracle certification.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book for those new to SQL
Review: This book is a very good first book for those persons interested in learning SQL because all of the information is of an introductory level. The chapters contain enough detail to get you started while remaining concise and to the point. It is not necessary to have availability to a relational database software package while reading this book, but it does help if the reader does. The software package can even be as simple as Microsoft's Access to help aid in the reader's understanding. The authors show examples from several major implementations, allowing the reader to get a broader understanding of SQL and it many flavors of specific implementations. The only flaw that I found in the book was numerous typographical errors throughout the entire book, including the appendices. This may cause some confusion to readers.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written, poorly edited
Review: This book is chalk-full of errors. And this is the second edition. Apparently little effort was made in improving the first edition. One must wonder if it was written in twenty-four hours. A book on a programming language needs credibility. Learning a foreign syntax is difficult enough as it is without behing hampered by one's learning material. By the time I got to chapter 4, all hope of credibility was lost, and this book is now going back to the bookstore.
Rating:
Summary: Full of error; not for self-study
Review: This book might be OK - in an instructor lead class; unfortunately one cannot rely on it for self-study; it is full of typos and outright errors( e.g. Hour 10 Quiz answer 2 tells you that "The HAVING clause can be used without a GROUP BY clause" !!! which is, of course, impossible...Also, the book pretends to be SQL-dialect neutral, in reality it is so ORACLE biased that some of its very basic SQL statements would not compile in Sybase or MS SQL Server...
I am a DBA (MS SQL Server/Sybase/ORACLE) with 5 years of experience; I looked into the book only because a friend of mine asked me for advice after struggling with it for couple weeks. Disappointing, to put it mildly.
Rating:
Summary: Great for ASP Developers
Review: This book was recommedned to me, and I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn SQL! One of my biggest problems in developing data driven ASP applications was requesting data from a relational database. In just a few short chapters, this book got me up and running fast!
Rating: 
Summary: 2 or 3 worthwhile chapters
Review: This would be a better library book to flip through. The book *tries* to teach you how to be a sql query writer; a sql administrator; a programmer with interfaces in sql. As one might expect, this is too broad a scope for any book, much less for one that is supposed to teach you everything in 24 hours! The book does a good job of walking you step by step through the lessons, and each is very easy to understand. After you've got the basics of query structure and language though, there is not enough reference material to help you get to intermediate queries. I'd keep looking or spend an hour with it in the library.
Rating:
Summary: The only good thing about this book -- it is ORACLE biased!
Review: Too many errors, typos, and inconsistansies. Definitely not a "Teach Yourself" type of book. The sample database design is not good for most of the examples -- the tables do not illustrate the concepts very well.
Rating:
Summary: The only good thing about this book -- it is ORACLE biased!
Review: Too many errors, typos, and inconsistansies. Definitely not a "Teach Yourself" type of book. The sample database design is not good for most of the examples -- the tables do not illustrate the concepts very well.
Rating:
Summary: Very disapointed
Review: Very disapointed in this book. Sams books are usually very comprehensive. Typos, examples that do not work, contradictions, and quiz answers that do not match the quiz questions. This is all before Chapter 12. Did anybody proof read this thing? Again, Very very disapointed
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