Former Microsoft employee says **Buy this one**
I worked in the SQL Server group at Microsoft for 5+ years. I learned more about T-SQL from Henderson's book than from any other. Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML is the book I saw most frequently on friends' shelves, and it's the only 3rd party book people consistently recommended. Buy it! :-)
Outdated
The downside to this book is that it is from 2000, and the code snippets are no longer available online. Also, since this book was written, there is a new Microsoft SQL Server product called 2005, that this book doesn't talk about obviously.
I don't recommend this book, because I really only got a few tips out of it. It's not suited well for a beginner or advanced user. It just kind of covers the whole range. And it's time to move on to books that use the latest software.
If I could only have one book for sql server...
...this would be it.
I have worked with Microsoft SQL Server day in and day out for many years now, and I have owned this book ever since it first came out. I have had some pretty funky tasks to perform with data and this book has come through with excellent solutions each and every time. I absolutely cannot tout it highly enough. It is easy to read, and full of actually useful code examples and information rather than pages of code printouts that are just filler.
If you work writing code for SQL Server, this book belongs on your bookshelf, if not on your desk.
Excellent material, just getting a bit long in the tooth
I bought this book seven years ago when doing my MCDBA in SQL Server 7.0. At the time I was focussing on getting my certifications and upon a cursory browsing, just couldn't get into this book.
Well it's now 2007, and having spent the last 7 years working with SQL Server 7.0, 2000 and 2005 I decided it was time to try this book again. I mention this to give a reference to where I'm coming from when I type the following comments.
First up, with the passage of time since publication, one would expect the material in this book to be well out of date - and as it turns out, you would not be disappointed. So before reading, I checked if any newer editions had been published since the first edition, and discovered there have been none - an assumed expectation considering the success of this book and that SQL Server has been updated and will continue to do so. As a consequence, expect some of the material and examples to be somewhat outdated (Transact-SQL syntax and methods have changed somewhat since publication). As an example, the section on error handling in stored procedures chapter has been outdated with TRY...CATCH exception handling, along with other examples of Transact-SQL syntax flagged to be retired.
All that aside, the true value in this book is the Transact-SQL samples. The author progresses through a problem using increasingly advanced SQL statements and explains each along the way. There is a sequence of chapters on "Runs and Sequences", "Arrays", "Sets" and "Hierarchies" that I thought could have been referenced elsewhere with more pages spent on practical areas of interest. Otherwise, as you can read from other reviews, the material covered is generally of a high standard.
As stated in other reviews, this is not a "Learn Transact-SQL" book, but more of a "Here is some Transact-SQL code that might help you".
The CD included contains just the Transact-SQL code samples from the book and is arranged in per chapter folder hierarchy.
Overall - a great if not somewhat terse effort. However, an updated version covering the Transact-SQL language changes in SQL 2005 would make this a 5 star book.
Great recommendation!
This book was recommended by a SQL consultant our company hired to improve the speed of our servers and it was well worth it! It covered a lot of the topics he had trained us on and gave very easy to follow examples.
(234 reviews)
