The Practical SQL Handbook: Using SQL Variants (4th ed.)

Continuing the grand tradition of reviewing computer texts sent to us by publishers, Slashdot author chrisd has read the book The Practical SQL Handbook: Using SQL Variants and written up a review. If you are interested, read on ... The Practical SQL Handbook, 4th Edition, SQL Variant author Judith S. Bowman, Sandra L. Emerson, Marcy Darnovsky pages 512 publisher Addison Wesley rating 9 reviewer chrisd ISBN 0201703092 summary An indispensable introduction to SQL. This is probably one of the best books I've read for those new to SQL. It's the kind of book I wish I had many years ago when I was first learning about databases. The only problem is the SQL variants are not really for me, a developer uninterested in Oracle, MS-SQL, Sybase or Informix. That said, this is a minor part of the book and doesn't really detract from it, and I can even come up with any number of reasons why a developer would want to have that information. A comparative text would be useful by itself, but I think that trying to teach SQL and several SQL variants is too big a job for any one book.

The books introductory text on SQL is clear and concise. I also found its treatment of normalization to be as close to perfect as can be with one exception: It doesn't tell when you can go too far with normalization. In an introductory text this is acceptable, and perhaps wise considering what many new to relational databases consider acceptable database design.

And while the introductory chapter is great, the chapters on selects and joins is so clear and useful that I would even call it exciting. The terrific thing about this book is when you have finished reading it you should come away with a feel for how the underlying DB actually works and what it is doing to produce the data for you.

I personally found this book very useful, even though I am using MySQL for the application I'm writing. But the feature set that MySQL chooses to support will logically limit the usefulness of the this book for the MySQL user. Programmers developing for Postgres, Firebird, and others will obviously get much more out of the book and its treatments on subqueries and views than will MySQL users.

One thing that did turn me off is the inclusion of a CD-ROM. The CD has a copy of Sybase for the user to work with. I don't need to explain that the internet is a superior place to put such things. That said, at least it wasn't glued to the back cover (a pet peeve) and was instead bound into the book like a magazine reply card. Many publishers perceive that they can charge more for a book that has a CD, but I just find it annoying and wasteful. But that's hardly a reason not to buy this book and place it on your bookshelf in a prominent position, not on the bottom ghetto shelves next to the stack of paper for your printer.

In short, those looking for an book about SQL, that won't teach them bad habits would be well served by this book (and likely by its sister book, The Practical SQL Handbook: Using Structured Query Language by the same authors) and those who think they know SQL will find it a useful text to have handy as well.

You can purchase The Practical SQL Handbook: Using SQL Variants from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:Very controversial book

[gazbo]

Although you can do some replication work yourself, I'm happy to concede that if you want the work done for you you need thrid party software. To say that Postgres doesn't support it is a bit misleading though.

Postgres doesn't support automated replication in the core code but there are open source plugins that will handle this. Equally, PHP does not support gzip functions as part of the core language, but should this be highlighted as a shortcoming of the language? No - just install zlib et voila!

I don't care whether the automated tools come with the core download or not - if they're freely available and work cleanly with the code (not dirty hacks) then there is no problem. Nested subqueries in MySQL is a problem as there was no (as far as I could google) patch I could apply that would enable this functionality. This is not true for pg replication.

A chapter on the shortcomings of Postgres wrt replication would be half a page long and consist of a list of URLs, saying "install one of these".