Customer Reviews

Database Design, Application Development, and Administration,fourth edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Coverage Level: This books is not a mathematically rigorous coverage of RDB theory. It is not a to-the-point pragmatic information dump for practitioners. Instead it seems to land in the middle as a textbook for one of the IT certifications that blossomed in the late 90s or DB design class in an associates degree program. However, if that's what you are looking for then this good book.

Topic Coverage: The title is an ordered listing of topic coverage quality, depth and enthusiasm. Design >> App Dev > Admin.
The book is, without exception, overly verbose; however, the more detailed breakdown is...
- SQL: 3/5 Required intro for a book of this sort but better covered in any number of O'Reilly etc books.
- ER diagrams: 5/5 Best I've read but I'm not sure if ER diagrams are really a topic to hang one's hat on.
- Scheme design: 4/5 Well covered but a futile topic to teach IMHO, requires first hand failures to learn.
- Normalization: 5/5 Really belongs in this book between set theory and practitioner texts on RDMSs.
- Views, triggers & procedures: 2/5 contrived examples that either suggest shoving the whole application into the DB or skipping these key features.
- Admin: 3/5 Not bad but more quickly and less expensively available in O'Reilly etc books.

Biggest Complaint: Strangely CS phobic in its lack of rigor which is unacceptable given its length and price.

Bottom line: A fine book, even a good book if you are looking for a middle ground text. Its strengths slant more towards schema design than DB dev or admin.

we used this book as main book for my graduate class, it is hard to follow, programming examples are not explained well, information scattered all over, it jumps between chapters for information.

While the content of the book is fine, the problems are absolutely horrible. Mannino frequently leaves out important information needed to solve the problems, makes typographical errors, references the wrong dates, jumps between different chapters and many other things.

On the Chapter 3 assignment for example there are TWO number 7's. One is hidden inside of 6.

I would highly not recommend this book.

Manning gives you a good exposition of the important ideas in putting together a database. The theory of relational databases is explained in enough detail that you should be able to apply this to your situation. Laying out whichever tables you need, in a judicious fashion, can take some skill. But by moving your data around, you should be able to find a suitable configuration of several tables, and the appropriate keys and foreign keys to connect these together.

The other portions of the book, which discuss actually coding this, and on being a database administrator, are also important. But the conceptually hardest parts relate to the initial design. And it is here that you should focus your efforts.

If you want to get down to the details of database, this is the book.