Rating: 
Summary: Leave this one on the shelf!
Review: In a book named "Clearly Explained" , you'd expect to have a minimum of confusion. That is not the case with this book. Page(25) for example: "Other many-to-many relationships include that between a child and her biological mother. A woman may have zero, one or more biological daugthers; a daugther has only one biological daughter" Please correct me if I'm wrong but that does not describe a many-to-many relationship. There are other confusing examples in the book (pg 33 for example). I found myself reading sections over and over because the examples were not that clear. Coupled with the errors, I found this book to be less than helpful.
Rating: 
Summary: Error-prone and academically obfuscated
Review: It is typical in DB texts to error in the examples, such as to assume all phone numbers only need 7 INTs (we all live in the same area code, and country, right?) However, in this book there are so many serious inaccuracies that I found myself doubting all of the information presented. A quick example, pp4 on page 24 and again on pp2 page 25, on "one-to-many" relationships, "Other many-to-many relationships include that between a child and her biological mother." Uh, is she talking multiple embryonic transplants? The information that *is* explained correctly is explained in a baffling, overly academic manner. For example, in explaining one-to-one relationships, "If we have two instances of two entities (A and B) called Ai and Bi, then a one-to-one relationship exists if at all times Ai is related to no instances of entity B and Bi is related to no instances of entity A or one instance of entity A." Right... way to painfully obfuscate a self-explanatory concept. The author makes assertions, promising to back them up further in the book, and then never does so. She goes on to build additional conceptual elements based on these unsubstantiated assertions. You'll find yourself both distrusting the assertions, due to the numerous errors, but required to "believe" just to get to the next concept. All around awful attempt.
Rating: 
Summary: A great introduction to database design!
Review: Jan Harrington accomplishes her task neatly, to clearly explain relational database design. I was very pleased with how quickly I was able to grasp fundamental concepts and I would recommend this book to anyone getting started with databases. I had hoped that the book would be perfect and would clearly explain every relevant concept but that was not the case. When it came to the three interesting case studies that concluded the book, the author used concepts that were never explained - control-break layout, parent entities, ISAM file organization, repeating groups, reblocking files. While not understanding these concepts did not stop me from grasping the fundamentals of database design it was frustrating and made clear that this is an introductory text and not the last book to read on the subject. There were also about a dozen typos but these were disconcerting rather than misleading.
Rating: 
Summary: Good 1st book on relational databases...
Review: My background is in non-relational databases and supporting them. This book explains the relational database theory in such simple, clear terms, that it was easy to relate the non-relational database that I'm familiar with relational database theory. This book was very objective about explaining the fundamentals of relational database theory without a lot of mis-directed 'fluff' or 'clutter' to boost the page count. I felt that the examples were great too. With all due respect to the efforts of the authors, editors, and publishers, the book did have some typographical errors in key places which was very confusing. There were only a handfull of them. I'd suggest if you find yourself TOO confused (especially when reading about one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships), it's a clue that you just ran across a typo.
Rating:
Summary: Good 1st book on relational databases...
Review: My background is in non-relational databases and supporting them. This book explains the relational database theory in such simple, clear terms, that it was easy to relate the non-relational database that I'm familiar with relational database theory. This book was very objective about explaining the fundamentals of relational database theory without a lot of mis-directed 'fluff' or 'clutter' to boost the page count. I felt that the examples were great too. With all due respect to the efforts of the authors, editors, and publishers, the book did have some typographical errors in key places which was very confusing. There were only a handfull of them. I'd suggest if you find yourself TOO confused (especially when reading about one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships), it's a clue that you just ran across a typo.
Rating:
Summary: beginner oriented
Review: The author claims to have condensed a college course down into a single 300 page book, which I would have trouble believing except that she apparently skipped over 1/2 of the course content. I do not think that this is a good book to explain Relational Databases, OR Database Design. The author gives a cursory explanation of each, then dives into an example DB with many hard-to-understand tables.
After confusing the reader with a 200,000 foot overview of Databases, the author goes into a very detailed explanation of the normalization process, which is IMPOSSIBLE to understand, and a long, drawn-out review of the theory of how a Relational Database Server should work, with no explanation of how current products do or do not adhere to this theory.
The author spends quite a bit of time plugging a Macintosh-Based ER system, all the way down to a section explaining the drawing environment of that *piece* of software.
Overall, this book was a waste of time. Buy Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez , a MUCH better book.
Rating:
Summary: Database Design clearly skipped over...
Review: The author claims to have condensed a college course down into a single 300 page book, which I would have trouble believing except that she apparently skipped over 1/2 of the course content. I do not think that this is a good book to explain Relational Databases, OR Database Design. The author gives a cursory explanation of each, then dives into an example DB with many hard-to-understand tables.
After confusing the reader with a 200,000 foot overview of Databases, the author goes into a very detailed explanation of the normalization process, which is IMPOSSIBLE to understand, and a long, drawn-out review of the theory of how a Relational Database Server should work, with no explanation of how current products do or do not adhere to this theory.
The author spends quite a bit of time plugging a Macintosh-Based ER system, all the way down to a section explaining the drawing environment of that *piece* of software.
Overall, this book was a waste of time. Buy Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez , a MUCH better book.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent weekend reading for database beginners.
Review: The book accomplished its main object: introduce the reader to database concepts without going into depth into any of the areas. This book should also be marketed as "Database for Dummies". I recommend this book to anyone who never read about databases. However, if you know what tables/indices are, get something else.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent weekend reading for database beginners.
Review: The book accomplished its main object: introduce the reader to database concepts without going into depth into any of the areas. This book should also be marketed as "Database for Dummies". I recommend this book to anyone who never read about databases. However, if you know what tables/indices are, get something else.
Rating:
Summary: Content does not stick to the book title.
Review: The writing quality is good, but the copy editing is terrible. This book seemed more like a junior SQL book than an introduction to database design.
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