Review: Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Hey, everybody. David Lean has posted a review of another recently published book on SQL Server 2008 by Microsoft Press: Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008 , by Leonard Lobel, Andrew J. Brust, and Stephen Forte.

Dave posts his reviews on his Dave does Data (Tutorials, Performance Tuning, Tips & Techniques on SQL Server & its ecosystem) blog.

Dave’s summary is a good one:

It appears to me that the authors started this book with the premise “There is a lot in SQL2008 that can dramatically change the way you architect solutions. Many features elegantly remove some of the clunky poor performance approaches we use today” So they set about drawing your attention to those features & mapping it back to the problems you currently experience when writing applications.

The book is a good read, plenty of code examples & screenshots to help understand the subject quickly (not just to pad out the pages).

But I think you’ll find his chapter-by-chapter description of the book most helpful. He tells you exactly what’s covered in each chapter so that you can determine if the book will meet your needs.

Dave even comments on how well the authoring team worked together (because, as we all know, sometimes multi-author books suffer quality-wise from the approach):

Like SQL 2008 Internals, this book is written by a team of authors. Handy because it is hard to specialise in everything. Compared to the SQL Internals authors, they must have spent much more time peer reviewing as there is a lot less variation in style between each chapter. Though you can see one author was keen to give a little background while one of the others prefers to dive right in.

Thanks again, Dave, for sharing your thoughts on our books. We look forward to your future feedback!