Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
Joe Celko

£44.75

buy from amazon

I was really looking forward to reading this book, it had been on my wish list for years....

But it's hard to know how to tackle it.

This is a heavyweight book and it's mostly organised by SQL keyword with some chapters on subjects like temporal queries and statistics.

It seems to me that the best way to read this book is cover to cover - but for me it's just to big to do that.

The book also suffers from being too oriented towards 'pure' SQL, spending pages on features that aren't yet available.

I've learned some things from the bits of the book I have read, but mostly this book is just sitting on the shelf.

This book is perhaps aimed at those people whose primary task is SQL and can therefore justify the time needed to get the most out of this book.

Those us of who are primarily programmers who also need to write SQL probably need to find something written more as a reference to dip into to solve particular problems.