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The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML Review by Paul O'Connor
Not as good as his first effort
I bought Ken Henderson's Guru's Guide to T-SQL a few years back and was extremely impressed with it. It was a "How-to-do-it" book with a 1001 good practical ideas that the hard-working database programmer could use immediately.
I bought this book because I am now working more with the topics that are supposed to be covered by this book, Stored Procedures, XLM, and HTML. I was impressed with how his first book had quickly and easily improved my skills and was interested in seeing what he could do for me in the new arena. Unfortunately it didn't work out.
In spite of the titles, the two books are barely related to each other. This book is a "why-you-do-it-this-way" book with a lot of philosophy and best-practice stuff and relatively few of the tips and tricks that I valued so highly in the first book. Unfortunately this information isn't that valuable now because the state of the art has kept changing and much of what he discusses either isn't relevant anymore or is now blindingly obvious.
But the problem with the book goes deeper than that. The extraordinary value of the first book was that it hit to Ken Henderson's strengths; very clear writing about very small topics with obvious and immediate payback for the reader. This book unfortunately tends to emphasize his weaknesses; poor organization, wandering off topic, and frequently saying too much that adds very little.
That's not to say that there aren't good reasons to buy this book, he's still a good clear author and there aren't enough of them in the technical writing field today. I particularly valued the essays at the end of the book and there are lots of valuable little nuggets that can be found throughout the entire book, just don't buy this book with the expectation that it will be the motherlode that his first book was.