Rating: 
Summary: Terrible waste of money
Review: Almost everything in this book can be found in the books on-line. This is like a printed version of them. If you need a printed version of the bol, get this book.
Rating:
Summary: A bad book
Review: Bought this without reading the reviews. Big mistake. Full of terribly simple examples and bad English. Not worth the time at all. Don't know where they get some of these authors.
Rating:
Summary: A bad book
Review: Bought this without reading the reviews. Big mistake. Full of terribly simple examples and bad English. Not worth the time at all. Don't know where they get some of these authors.
Rating:
Summary: Borrows heavily from Henderson's Guru's Guide to T-SQL
Review: I wish I hadn't wasted my money on this. I recognize much of this 'cookbook' code from Ken Henderson's Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL book. That book is well-written and full of innovative code. This one isn't. This one is filled with horrid English and gradeschool grammar errors and code that looks like it came from somewhere else. There's little or no explanation for much of the code. What explanations there are are frequently wrong. I will be returning this for a refund.
Rating: 
Summary: a real life saver
Review: I've read this book and I'm recommending it to all my friends. This book contains concise explanations of many important topics. Anyone who would like to learn about the concepts should read it since it covers almost all levels of understanding from the overall picture to the nitty-gritty details of Transact-SQL. Examples are clear and well structured.
Not for beginners and probably not for hard-core gurus. For me, a programmer with no good mentor to learn from, this book is very useful. Overall, this book has everything you need to master TSQL programming on your own.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Reference
Review: Information on performing statistics calculations using TSQL is very rare. Using this book, I was able to write a couple of User-Defined Functions that provide both Confidence Intervals and Exact Confidence Intervals.Although TSQL isn't the right tool for this particular job, requirements can sometimes put you in a bind. I would like to see this chapter greatly expanded in a future edition. Someone needs to fill this vacuum.
Rating:
Summary: Best Buy!
Review: No DBA nonsense, just plain programming. Great stuff, clear explanations, excellent code!!! It's an incredible book that can really help programmers get up to speed quickly.
Rating: 
Summary: Good (but basic), practical text
Review: Rather than a real-world "cookbook", ostensibly targeted to database professionals who want to avoid reinventing the wheel, this book would be better positioned as a companion to an introductory text on SQL (e.g. for a class on SQL, where the class laboratory work employs SQL Server). One or two of the chapters do cover problems which baffle a lot of experienced SQL programmers with whom I have worked; a good example is the chapter on the implementation of hierarchical data models. There is some minimal attention paid to performance implications of alternative query formulations, but very little useful information on practical database and query tuning. The practical examples are generally good for building the necessary context for the various implementations, but there are some clear gaps in the authors' understanding of the underlying business problems and the conceptual solution techniques. Also, there are some flat-out errors: for example, the explanation (and the implementation) of exponential averaging (more commonly referred to as smoothing) is simply incorrect. All in all, I would recommend this to someone who is just learning SQL, and is having trouble "getting their head" around how it would be used in practice. For someone already working in the field, an online subscription to SQL Server magazine (giving access to all of the source code for the articles) would be a better investment.
Rating:
Summary: Good (but basic), practical text
Review: Rather than a real-world "cookbook", ostensibly targeted to database professionals who want to avoid reinventing the wheel, this book would be better positioned as a companion to an introductory text on SQL (e.g. for a class on SQL, where the class laboratory work employs SQL Server). One or two of the chapters do cover problems which baffle a lot of experienced SQL programmers with whom I have worked; a good example is the chapter on the implementation of hierarchical data models. There is some minimal attention paid to performance implications of alternative query formulations, but very little useful information on practical database and query tuning. The practical examples are generally good for building the necessary context for the various implementations, but there are some clear gaps in the authors' understanding of the underlying business problems and the conceptual solution techniques. Also, there are some flat-out errors: for example, the explanation (and the implementation) of exponential averaging (more commonly referred to as smoothing) is simply incorrect. All in all, I would recommend this to someone who is just learning SQL, and is having trouble "getting their head" around how it would be used in practice. For someone already working in the field, an online subscription to SQL Server magazine (giving access to all of the source code for the articles) would be a better investment.
Rating:
Summary: This book is great!
Review: The chapters in the book are laid out properly. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to further expand their knowledge. There are some errors in the book. But this is so typical of programming books. I haven't run into any problems that I couldn't figure out. It helped me solve a problem that had been pestering me for some time. Like other O'Reilly titles, the book is an excellent piece of work.
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