Vital Information Missing
Bad even for a dummies book. Vital information is missing and makes serious assumptions about the knowledge of the reader. I can't recommend this.
Very Disappointed
Actually I just start to read this book. So far I can say it very disappoints me. The author use the first two entire chapters to 'list' the features in MS SQL Server 2005. For me, a newbie, totally have no idea what he is talking about.
Hard to follow
I agree with the previous reviewer. This book is not focused and not targeted to an audience. Most of the features are not covered with enough depth and background to make the information useful. The chapter on replication, which is an advanced feature, was pretty good, but the chapters on backup and recovery where poorly explained.
Confusing
This author often forgets who he is talking to. At one point he describes in painful detail on how to join tables and yet in other places he introduces terminology with no explanation. One chapter is devoted to creating a windows application in VS 2005 to display data and the description is incorrect. Is this a book about SQL Server or Visual Studio? I think the publishers of this book would do well to recall this book and rewrite with a particular audience in mind. Is the book an introduction for newbies or a reference for those coming from some other platform or for programmers looking to familiarize themselves with SQL Server? The fact that this is a dummies book would seem to indicate to me that it should be for newbies. I have always been a fan of the Dummies series of books but this one falls flat on its face.
