Customer Reviews

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 Programming Unleashed (2nd Edition)

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The authors claim in the preface that the book covers undocumented facts and tips for SQL Server 7. Nothing could be farther from truth considering that the book is not even up to date in coverage of the newer areas. Microsoft's strategic direction for data access is going to be OLE-DB(Object linking and embedding database, as the book says!!), yet they devote more than 150 pages to the drab ODBC.

The book helped a lot in gaining insight as to how SQL Server works and how to write efficient programs. The author has a very original and pleasant style; the book is more fun to read than most books of its class. However the book suffers from numerous misspellings and other technical inaccuracies, and has an irritating unevenness in the amount of detail given to various topics. A good proofreading and a 2nd edition would be in order.

This is the worst book I've ever read!

First of all, there is nothing advanced in this book! Each chapter tries to cover one aspect/tech with 75% basic features. The other 25% usually is sample codes which you may not be interested at all.

There are many chapters which should not be in this book. For example, the chapter covers "Visual C++ with SQL server" is full of ODBC API functions, nothing specific about SQL Server 7. Another chapter for "Microsoft COM/DCOM" is nothing but a bad whitepaper for COM/DCOM. You can get a lot better idea of COM/DCOM by reading the white paper by Don Box. And the list goes on...

This book has 13 authors - 1 from Canada, 1 from Australia, the other 11 are from at least 9 states of US! I don't think it's possible for readers to expect a consistent style/content from a book like this.

It does cover, or tries to cover, "integrating SQL Server 7 with VB, Transact-SQL, Visual C++, Visual InterDev, legacy system data from Oracle, Sybase, and Access", as stated by the editor/authors. With 30 pages on each topic, full of basic features/introduction, maybe a couple of tricks, it does not "offer depth and breadth of coverage not found in any other book on the market" (as stated by editor/authors) at all!

I believe the only usage, if any, of this book is for beginners to get an idea of some of the technologies people are using with SQL Server.

The boook is very good to beginners. Without source code, reader is hard to practice.