This book is everything I was looking for. I bought it on my recent trip to United States. I had a chance to read it on the long flight back to Europe. I needed a clear and concise book to help me with my MS SQL programming problems. I think I found it. It clearly explains logic behind the code and examples. Other books often mix together a lot of other topics, but not this one. The text is only about coding. No administration or fine-tuning. I think it's a very good book for programmers.
If your interests include administration and other topics for DBA's, this book will be of no help for you. But that's the strength of the book. Just a few hundred pages, but no page is wasted on issues not directly related to coding.
Rather than a real-world "cookbook", ostensibly targeted to database professionals who want to avoid reinventing the wheel, this book would be better positioned as a companion to an introductory text on SQL (e.g. for a class on SQL, where the class laboratory work employs SQL Server).One or two of the chapters do cover problems which baffle a lot of experienced SQL programmers with whom I have worked; a good example is the chapter on the implementation of hierarchical data models.
There is some minimal attention paid to performance implications of alternative query formulations, but very little useful information on practical database and query tuning.
The practical examples are generally good for building the necessary context for the various implementations, but there are some clear gaps in the authors' understanding of the underlying business problems and the conceptual solution techniques. Also, there are some flat-out errors: for example, the explanation (and the implementation) of exponential averaging (more commonly referred to as smoothing) is simply incorrect.
All in all, I would recommend this to someone who is just learning SQL, and is having trouble "getting their head" around how it would be used in practice. For someone already working in the field, an online subscription to SQL Server magazine (giving access to all of the source code for the articles) would be a better investment.
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