Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Sincere warning to newbies: Don't buy this book!!!
Comment: This is my first review and I'm sad to say it is a negative one. I bought this book after having read all the other positive reviews. I discounted some of the few negative ones.
This book requires you download and run a couple of scripts to create and populate sample tables. I provides HORRIBLE instructions on how to do this.
This guy, Ben, was nice enough to create a site where users can ask him questions. You will be lucky if he responds to your question but even if he does, it will be rather smug, and in my case, incomplete.
I bear no ill will towards this guy, but caveat emptor - unless you are already very comfortable with struggling mightily with lots of time to burn to get basic questions answered - don't buy this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Primo SeQueL
Comment:
If you manage SQL developers, or hire SQL consultants, this book will give you a deeper understanding of exactly what they are doing and give you a more realistic expectation of results.
If you are new or returning to SQL this is the ideal primer. Ben covers the gamut of SQL statements from basic to fairly advanced, and leaves you feeling that you really learned something you can use right away - this is typical of Ben's books.
This book covers general SQL statements for ANSI Standard SQL, but also addresses application specifics for Oracle, MS SQL Server, MS Access, MySQL and a few others.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A nice summary if you learned from the bottom up.
Comment: I learned my SQL by supporting the SQL of others, reading MSDN, and working with DBAs for new queries. I never made much of SQL since I often had DBAs I was told to use or used APIs that built SQL (now such as Kodo JDOQL).
However, I since also have to debug JDOQL, that means reading SQL traces. So... I needed a cheap, concise book with easy to follow examples. This book did that, and gave me thinking points to start with "what ifs" for scenarios and failure cases.
Also, it provided a simple, non-wind-bagged explanation of joins that sticks with me. Turns out I have been doing implicit INNER JOINS for years without knowing the fancy terminology for the "equijoin".
It is not the SQL bible, but it is not over-priced liked one. It is not a replacement for your DBMSs reference manual, as it often defers to the documentation for "further details". It is fast paced and practical. It does cover several DBMSs to some degree.
If you are a hard core DBA this is not it, but if you are developer who wants to take some power back from your DBAs, understand query traces, and write some useful queries that don't over exploit DBMS X's Stored Procedure syntax... this book may be useful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Quick Resource - Easy to Understand for Newbies
Comment: This is a phenomenal resource that can be used as a quick resource or to learn SQL from scratch. The examples are easy to understand and then apply to the real world. It is not a resource for SQL guru's and doesn't address everything SQL is capable of. It does, however, reflect 80% of the features that are used 95% of the time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: more like four and a half stars
Comment: I bought Learning SQL (O'Reilly) mistakenly thinking that it might be a good book for a novice. Teach Yourself SQL is a good book for a novice - a really good book. This book is a series of lessons that will get you up and running right away. I found I retained more with Forta's lesson style over the reference book style. A great book to start SQL.
Why 4 1/2 stars? This book covers most of the major DBMS: MYSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, etc. It is amazing that one book can effectively address so many programs. But as I went further into the book I found myself getting stuck in sections that did not apply to the DBMS I was using (MYSQL). I eventually started using MySQL Crash Course (Sams Teach Yourself in 10 Minutes) which is a very similar, but an even better book. If you are thinking of learning SQL on MYSQL, go get the Crash Course.
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