Rating: 
Summary: a bad book
Review: This is a poorly written, badly organized, and inaccurate book. It commits, repeatedly, the mortal sin of any text book by reffering to terms and concepts before they are introduced; its use of language is, well, 'non standard'; and there are plenty of typos. All in all a waste of money!
Rating: 
Summary: For more information, visit http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook
Review: This is a textbook for undergraduate and graduate database courses, and comes with extensive exercises. It evolved from the introductory and second database courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been widely class-tested. It uses a hands-on, example-driven approach, and emphasizes practical issues (SQL, database design and physical tuning, implementation). It also covers advanced topics, including object databases and decision support. Accompanying software, lecture slides and solutions are available.
Rating:
Summary: Can't be worse
Review: This is by far the worst textbook I've ever had. The language is ambiguous, uninteresting and full of typos. From time to time this book makes me doubt my ability of reading English. By the way I am a "straight A" student. I wish I didn't have to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Put in your Don't Buy List
Review: This is the worst text book that I have ever used. The author seems to have no experience of writing text book. The concepts are not explained in the clear/easy understandable way. After reading some of the topics, I did not feel help rather confused. I am really disppointed. I will not recommend this book to any one since it is a big waste of money:-(!
Rating:
Summary: Confusing and poorly written
Review: To be blunt, this book is terrible. I've read the first 21 chapters very carefully. The coverage of material is fairly thorough. However, the text is confusing, poorly written, and lacks useful examples. Some sentences were so ambiguous that I needed to read them 5-10 times to understand what the authors were apparently trying to say. I've been involved in academic science and engineering for 15 years, and strongly feel that this is one of the worst textbooks I've ever read. As an alternative, you might consider the book by Garcia-Molina et al - although I haven't read that book carefully enough to intelligently compare the two.
Rating:
Summary: poorly written and confusing! not even worth its price
Review: Well, I am sure authors have a lot of experience in the field of DBMS. However, what they wrote is just experience, not concept or formal definition. It is extremely easy for beginners to get entangled in the lengthy and vague chatting description. For those who know something about DBMS like me, this book turns out to make them more confused. I think even the writting style needs much room to improve. My have-to course requires this textbook, but I avoided buying it. Hohoho! spending over 100 bucks on this? I don't think so. I borrowed it from my friend only for the test. If you look for a good book, try "Database Systems Concepts" or "Database Systems Implementation". They are really good, at least for me.
Rating: 
Summary: It enables to understand difficult and key concepts well
Review: When the publisher/author requested me to be a beta test site for the book about 2 years back, I thought the book written by some one who is at U of Wisconsin, written papers in logic programming would not be suitable for RMIT and gave a diplomatic reason to the author when he probed further by email. When the book was released in Australia a few months back we adopted it immediately for our 3rd year under grad. students although the book was expected to arrive a few days late for start of classes. I like the way the material is presented - keeping the practical implication/real life application in mind all the time, eg. section 5.7, 5.8 on B-trees(I rarely find these practical aspects mentioned in other sources). Query processing topics in Chap 12, 13 are presented as practical material which keeps the students interest rather than making it boring. The best I have liked so far is the coverage of concurrency control, transaction processing issues in Chap 17, 18. All the things are well tied together. Material is presented in the order that makes user understand the material - serializability is introduced right at the beginning (as against after a whole lot of definitions and theorems). Lot of insignificant(not the right word) material is made brief such as material in Section 17.8. The above topics I have read in detail and covered in the lectures. I have browsed through data mining, oodb, dist. dbs chapters and like the coverage and will be covering in lectures in the next few weeks. The complete solutions available online well complements the text material. I will have more detailed comments at the end of the semester. I do have a number of minor suggestions which is better communicated to the author. The best sentence is the one acknowledging his brother!
| 
