Book Review: Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers

Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers by Robin Dewson lives up to it's title of being a helpful resource for beginners to SQL Server 2005. The author patiently walks the reader through the basics & a wide breadth of topics with adequate examples in the 500+ paged book spanning 14 chapters. Many of the examples are demonstrated using multiple modes - SQL Server Management Studio, TSQL & Templates.

The book is filled with interesting facts, "gotchas", practical tips & tricks that make the chapters engaging. I have used the SELECT statement for years but I did not know that $IDENTITY & $ROWGUID can be used with the SELECT statement to return the value from the IDENTITY column & the ROWGUID column if such columns exist within the table being querying upon. Similarly I have used the COUNT function but didn't know there was a COUNT_BIG function as well that returns a bigint data type value unlike COUNT which returns an int type value.

I feel the information in the book could have been better presented & organized. There were some places where the examples of usage could have been closer to the topic for better assimilation.

My rating: 4/5

Also see:
SSMS Tips & Tricks
Free SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things Near Me – Find & Learn About Landmarks Nearby

Image
Back in 2012, I was planning to build a location-aware app that would tell me about interesting sights & news-worthy facts about places that fall in the way of a train journey. I discovered that Web Dev guru Chris Heilmann ( @codepo8 ) had built a nifty app on a similar theme and shared the JavaScript code under the BSD license.  Things Around You used the browser's geolocation feature to find Wikipedia articles on nearby landmarks via the GeoNames API & list them with a brief description. For a Windows 8 app hackathon, I utilized the Geolocation detection idea to build a little app that I called GeoBuzz & posted it on the Windows 8 App Store. It's been on the back of my mind to extend it with more features. Now that GitHub Copilot is here, there was no need to procrastinate. I had a friendly chat with GitHub Copilot ( Gemini Flash model ). In under an hour, I customized @codepo8's original sample to include a map directly on the web page instead of linking t...
Read more

What is the difference between Browser Mode & Document Mode in IE

Image
If you're a web developer and your job actively involves building web pages that work the same in all browsers including the last three versions of IE, you'll be no stranger to Browser  & Document Mode in Internet Explorer These options are available with IE Developer Tools (F12 keyboard shortcut). In IE9, these modes let you emulate older versions of IE8 & IE7. Microsoft provides these modes so that websites that were built to target IE7 & lower versions don't fail hopelessly in the newer & more standards-based versions. IE provides a fallback in the form of the Compatibility View button which allows content designed for older web browsers to render well in newer versions of Internet Explorer 9.  Here are the differences between Browser Mode & Document Mode - Browser Mode determines the User Agent sent to the server & the Document Mode IE defaults to. Document Mode determines the layout (rendering engine) and the JavaScript engine. Document...
Read more