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Title: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL by Ken Henderson ISBN: 0-201-61576-2 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Pub. Date: 23 February, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.76 (217 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Worth every penny
Comment: I have purchased every major Sql Server book over the last seven years. I have them all. I have read about Sql Server voraciously since getting out of school, and there can be only one word to describe Henderson's Guru's Guide books: indespensible. They are head and shoulders above all of the other books out there.
The reasons for this are many. I will list but a few:
- Extremely well-written. Henderson has a penchant for explaining subjects in ways that no one else seems to be able to. Passages sometimes require more than one read because they are so deep, but the time is always well spent.
- Loaded, absolutely loaded, with code. If you manage Sql Server machines for a living you will find that you can drop much of the code into place on your production machines without modificaton. Sp_find_root_blocker, sp_diffdb, sp_generate_script... these are all wonderful pieces of code that make the books worth the price for the code alone.
- Extremely deep. One subject after another is covered in excruciating detail. Henderson's books are deeper and more extensive than any other class of technical books I have read.
- Wide-ranging. Henderson doesn't stick to just a narrow part of the product, but covers subjects that real DBA's and developers would need: Full-text search, DTS, replication, query performance optimation, XML, etc. If you get and read all three of the Guru's Guide books, you will have as good of coverage of the entire product as exists.
There are few authors who are as passionate about great technical writing as we DBA's and developers are about building and maintaining software systems. Ken Henderson is obviously one of them.
Rating: 5
Summary: Value beyond the merely technical
Comment: What distinguishes this book from other computer books is that it has value beyond the technical info it imparts. If you took all the technical info out (most of the book, no doubt), you'd still have very finely crafted prose - something that you'd enjoy reading for its own sake.
The epigraphs that start each chapter are edgy and thought-provoking. The asides sprinkled throughout the book wherein the author delves into his own background to explain a concept or defend a position are interesting in and of themselves. The text is written quite well, and provides insight into what it takes to write world-class code in the first place, regardless of whether it's in Transact-SQL or some other language.
And one more thing: the author has been extremely gracious with me personally. I wrote the email address included in the book with some essoteric questions that I didn't really expect to even garner a response. I was pleasantly surprised when I received a reply a few days later. Since then, I've quizzed him over several other little difficulties I've stumbled upon in my work. Each and every time, he writes back - often with very novel and clever solutions to my little problems. He's the most gracious author I've ever "met", and his book belongs in your library if you do anything with SQL Server's Transact-SQL.
Rating: 4
Summary: Requires newer versions
Comment: My company has a mix of SQL Svr 6.5, 7.0, and 2000 servers. Unfortunately, much of the code in this book is not portable across the three versions - it requires at least 7.0 if not 2000. Probably half of it will not run on 6.5. Our corp dev standards require T-SQL that runs on all three, so we couldn't use some of the code in the book.
Other than that the book is very good. I had to turn quoted_identifer off to run some of the scripts, but they all run on 7.0 and 2000 just fine. Not only that but they teach a lot of the new features and secrets of using the language. How to write system-level code and how to use undocumented features. We're using the array code in two of our systems as I speak.
I'm not saying that requiring SQL Svr 7.0/2000 is a fundamental weakness but it's why I can't give the book 5 stars. If you are on 7.0 or later and want to write high-quality, speedy, professional code, this is the book to have. If you need code that is portable back to 6.5 I would suggest Klein's book instead.
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Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM) by Ken Henderson ISBN: 0201700468 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 27 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
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Title: The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals by Ken Henderson ISBN: 0201700476 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 24 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $54.99 |
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Title: Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming (Programmer to Programmer) by Robert Vieira ISBN: 0764543792 Publisher: Wrox Pub. Date: 15 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $59.99 |
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Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook by Ken England ISBN: 1555582419 Publisher: Digital Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $47.95 |
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Title: SQL Server 2000 Programming by Example by Fernando G. Guerrero, Carlos Eduardo Rojas ISBN: 0789724499 Publisher: Que Pub. Date: 17 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $39.99 |
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