Rating: 
Summary: A good book
Review: Ben Forta's SQL in 10 Minutes is a concise, easy-to-understand book. I'm going to keep it handy as a reference/teaching tool for use with friends and co-workers. I am pleasantly surprised that such a small book covers SQL so well.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good reference and easy to read book.
Review: I am new to SQL and bought this book because of the "10 minutes" fast learning part. It does deliver what it promises. It is easy to read with very good hands-on examples. I downloaded the examples from the authors website and is using MS Query to test the examples. If you want to learn the basics of SQL and start being productive in no time, this is a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Quick and Dirty, as it Implies
Review: I generally don't write reviews of products unless they are fantastic or absolutely horrible. This is FANTASTIC. If you have programming experience and some familiarity with MS Access, this is a great book for you. I was able to go through the entire thing in 8 hours, take notes and import 3500 records from an old database into a new one with much greater ease. Pros:
-It differentiates between SQL Server, Oracle and the SQL specification on several examples.
-An introduction to advanced features is given in the last few chapters with examples.
-Small book allows quick scanning Cons:
-Not very visual. Organization of information and the layout of it is done well, but as far as pictures go, they are absent.
-Title is somewhat deceiving, 10 minutes if you are only trying to find an example to use for reference.
-Not for those who have little or no programming experience. Explains functionality of code and the big picture. On more complex examples, details on sections of code are left out and assumed to be understood.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic book for learning SQL quickly
Review: I searched for the smallest book on SQL, hoping to find a book that cut out the fluff and just gave me the essential information. I was coming from a programming perspective and didn't want a book that droned on and on about why I wanted to learn SQL, or how databases worked. I just wanted to learn how to write basic and not-so-basic SQL, and this is definitely the book. The pleasantly surprising part was that it actually does a great job of simply and directly explaining SQL, and it even serves as a passable reference once you've finished reading it. I just can't say enough for the format of the book. Ben Forta has divided the book into short comprehensible chapters and then used short, direct explanations of the concepts, followed by several examples of increasing complexity that build on each other to introduce the finer points. I read this entire book on a 4-hour plane ride with time to spare. It was an easy read and there was no problem remembering it all. I can't imagine how to write a book to teach SQL either faster, easier or more effectively than this book does. I can't really say how my opinion of the book might be different if I came from a non-programming background, but for my money (and not much of it at that), this is the first SQL book anyone should buy.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction into the SQL world
Review: I started with Cold Fusion and SQL a number of months ago, knowing next to nothing about either. Although this book does not cover Cold Fusion specifically, it is populated with many 10 minute lessons which can be applied to 'any' online programming language. Forta includes many real world examples on each lesson, very descriptive explanations and an overall healthy dose of common SQL syntax, including select, insert, modify, delete, where, joins, sorting, groups, like (used with searching databases), table combinations, subqueries, aggregate functions, transaction processing and much, much more. At the end of the book, Forta has included simple, easy to follow instructions on connecting to databases with popular programming languages like Cold Fusion, ASP, SQL Server, Visual Basic, Visual C++, DB2 and more. You will definitely keep this book by your side in your SQL adventures. Steve - Web developer http://www.stevesdomain.net
Rating:
Summary: Good Succinct Primer on SQL
Review: I taught a class to co-workers who had no SQL experience using this book, covering the first 6 chapters in approximately 4 hours; and the next day they were able to assist in writing queries, easing my workload (this is an excellent book to use for learning how to write queries, but it does not cover design, for that see Steven Roman's Access Database Design and Programming). This book demands a careful reading as it explains the syntactical differences between different implementations of SQL (e.g., Access uses * and ? as wildcards as opposed to % and _).
Rating:
Summary: Well written and a great reference
Review: I've been programming professionally for 20 years, and until now never really had any need for a database. Over the years I've created many simple to moderately complex Access databases for my own use, but never for commercial or industrial use.
I bought this book to "flesh out" my understanding of the building blocks of SQL. To that end, this book has done an outstanding job. The chapters build upon each other in a logically sequential manner, and the information presented is both necessary and sufficient to illustrate the topic effectively.
This is not an advanced book, but it provides a solid understanding of SQL. I'm giving it 4-stars because I now write Oracle and SQL Server databases for commercial and industrial use, and I find myself still using it as a primary reference.
Rating:
Summary: Quick and Painless and Easy
Review: My copy of this book is hopelessly dog-eared and marked with notes. It's gotten the most use out of all my computer books. It teaches the basics of SQL in an easy manner and then is useful as a reference thereafter. It's cheap too. It's bare-bones but hits all the essentials.
Rating:
Summary: Concise Introduction to SQL
Review: This book is a well-written, well-organized, concise introduction to SQL. Each of the 22 lessons takes about 10 minutes to complete. The same files are used throughout and are available from the author's Web site. Using these files and the author's numerous examples, one can learn SQL step-by-step as painlessly as possible.
There is one deficiency, though. Appendix E lists all SQL Reserved Words, but doesn't provide the exact syntax to use (for different DBMS's) or examples. Correcting this would subtantially increase the size of the book but would be extremely useful for reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Good as a basic intro, but don't depend solely on this book
Review: This book is clearly aimed at the beginning SQL programmer with little or no knowledge of relational databases. It's a good intro that will quickly get the reader up to speed at writing some very simple queries and updates on an existing database. However, in working with other programmers, I've learned that it's true about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. If your only knowledge of SQL and relational databases comes from this book, you're in danger of missing out on some very basic information, such as how to normalize a database or perform an outer join. If you learn SQL from this book, you'll quickly want to get another book on SQL that's more complete to fill you in on this missing critical information. Unless for some reason you need to start programming in SQL as soon as possible (in other words, before you understand what you're doing), just skip this book and buy just the more complete book.
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