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SQL: Practical Guide for Developers (The Practical Guides) Review by Robert W. Waite
Decent intro book... Unforgivable index..
This would have been a fair book for a developer's quick reference. It covers many of the broad topics (select, update, nested queries, joins) and does so in a decent fashion. I originally bought this book so that I could have a quick reference nearby that I could look up UNION or other statements that are not used as much.
I was pretty happy with the book as I read through it... that is until the day that I actually had to find a statement in it. I have quite a large collection of computer books and I have never seen anything like it. If you turn to the index page to look up SELECT (I mean... really?) there is no entry there. In fact.. all you see is one page with three columns that have about 20 items per column. And all of this fills about half of the page. Oh wait! There is a little sticker up at the top of this ridiculous page that says "See such and such a webpage for full index".
The worst thing about this index is that it doesn't even have useful entries. It is as if some typesetter had about five minutes before the presses started up and someone said "Hey!!! Billy! We don't have an index! Why don't you randomly look up about 50 words in the book and make a real quick index! No one will know!" Well.. sadly.. Billy didn't have any idea what SQL was except that it starts with an 'S'.
The only reason I give two stars instead of -1 is that it seems that the author made a decent effort to make a simple introduction to SQL for a poor developer who needs a quick source for answers. The only problem is the index will not help someone find that quick answer.
So... I would stay away from this book unless you know that the index which has been posted on the publishers website is actually part of the book.
Bah to MK publishers! All they needed to do was spend two days making an index instead of scrambling and they would have had 4 stars and I wouldn't have tossed this book into the corner behind all of the other disappointing books I have.