Customer Reviews

SQL Unleashed, Second Edition (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I spent 2 weeks trying to figure out if I was a moron or dyslexic, but I was wrong... it was just that nobody proofed this book.

I finally figured out that: 1) The book didn't match the disk. 2) The book didn't match SQL. 3) The book didn't match itself from one chapter to the next. 4) The book didn't match anything the help line (and I usually the term VERY loosely) knew. Their response was "Well, it's hard to catch all the errors."

I finally returned it for credit. This is the ONLY book I have EVER returned for errors.

SQL Unleashed was exactly what I needed--a book to round out my knowledge of SQL.

I have a pretty good practical working knowledge of SQL, but lots of holes. This book filled in the gaps and gave me lots of practical help instead of pure theory.

This Intermediate - Advanced SQL book is one of the best I've seen. It covers ALL of the Advanced topics of SQL with different SQL implementations and also includes the SQL standards. This book also has a very nice Introduction to SQL section that will be useful to beginners.

This book should be entitled Oracle SQL Unleashed. It seems specifically geared toward Oracle, and it appears that Oracle has many extensions not found in Microsoft or Syabse (which use Transact-SQL). Therefore, you should purchase this book only if you use Oracle. Despite it being useless, I tried skimming through it, just in case something would actually work with MS or Sybase. I found the book poorly organized and poorly written. It was confusing, and I have never seen such poorly structured code samples.

I have read a number of SQL books for different purposes. "SQL Unleashed" stands out as an excellent reference book that nicely combines practical approach with understanding of the underlying concepts. The author has gone a great length in making the book practically useful, starting with "nuts and bolts" with plenty of examples, tips, real life experiences and "dos and don'ts".

Overall the book seems quickly slapped together with lots of things left out. Specifically, 2 major omissions: 1) clear text explaining exactly what each concept is and how it works. With most things the author tried to explain it felt like he was giving you the answer you would expect if you weren't really interested in thoroughly understanding the concept. ("The cockpit, what is it? It's the little room where the pilot sits, but that's not important right now!") 2) Many of the listings are missing from the CD. In particular , none of the Chapter 10 listings are present, which is unfortunate, because when I finally realized that the only way I was going to really understand what was going on was to actually run the example sql code, I was at Chapter 10! For a book which relies on the examples to communicate the concepts (since it does such a poor job of explaining things in words) this is really , really careless! The author even refers to the 'output' which isn't printed in the book (careless omission) and apparently can only be recreated by re-typing in the example listings, since the source code is nowhere to be found on the CD.

This book might be useful as a reference for general SQL, and oracle and MS variants, but not much else.

I have been using SQL Unleashed for over a year, and it is the book I consult first when I have a SQL question. It has hundreds of examples, all of them extremely well explained.

We been looking for a book that covered in detail all the SQL comands. We looked at every SQL book out there, and found SQL Unleashed to be the most comprehensive and detailed with plenty of examples.

It paid for itself many times over the first day. For example, try finding in other books how to handle division by zero in your SQL. It had a complete explantion with examples.

Overall, a comprehensive reference guide that you will find using over and over.

While the book does a good job of covering the concepts and design of SQL the numerous code examples contain errors ranging from comments not commented out correctly to erroneous code that causes program halts or crashes. Some of the example code refered to in the book is missing from the CD-ROM. All this makes it difficult for a novice attempting to learn SQL. More advanced users should have no problem. I chose not to use it as the primary or supplementary text for the graduate class I teach on DB programming. Knowing Hans work and the the quality of Sams I was disappointed by both. A better book is The Practical Sql Handbook (ISBN 0201447878) which is the one I opted to use for class.

I had this book for a SQL class that I took and this book was NO help at all. I learned SQL soley on the handout notes that the instructor gave out during class. This book is not easy to understand if you are a beginner and if you are one then pass on this book.