This book is not bad for browsing to see if anything has

changed from sql server 2000 to 2005.

I like the book since it is clean and quick to go through.

It would have helped if the author ziped up a detached version of the apressFinancial database since for a beginner this book

can be a real pain in the neck to go through since no data

to work with. the other problem I have with the book is

that it is misleading to say novice to professional.

This book does not have even midlevel skills we need to do

most database work with sql server 2005 let alone not introduce you to a majority of the new features of the sql server 2005 we need to do our jobs
by .Net learner, Rating: 2 / 5

‘Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers: From Novice to Professional’ by Robin Dewson is a nice guide for someone new to working with SQL Server. While the content within is alright, I feel there are better books out there on the market for introducing this concept to developers. The title of this book says ‘SQL Server 2005′ but I don’t find a lot of specific examples within, the chapter breakup is odd at times (chapter 8 is HUGE compared to all the others — 14 in total), and I just don’t care for the layout or writing that much.

It’s not a bad book, but it’s not great either. Pick this up if you like Apress books, else look elsewhere.

***
by Daniel McKinnon, Rating: 3 / 5

This book was assigned reading for a SQL Server 2005 certification course that I am taking. It is well-written with a clear and concise database example that is followed through the entire text. The code that was given was not only good for teaching but I was also able to implement it in project work. It also has a pretty good beginner tutorial on Reporting Services and this book also goes into the basics of T-SQL.

A deficiency that I found was there was discussion on triggers and sprocs but nothing at all regarding functions. Also, I think there should have been more time spent on indexes. I had to use a different reference to gain a proper understanding of the differences between clustered and non-clustered indexes. I also think that there should have been a few pages devoted to XML since it was mentioned in the book in quite a few places without proper introduction.

All in all, this book is worth the buy if you are a beginner using SQL Server 2005 functionality.
by Gresford Thomas, Rating: 4 / 5

This really is one of the worst computing books I’ve ever read: it’s very badly structured, poorly written and not too hot on the facts either.

Reading this book is like being sat down with the bumbling office grunt who has just been told to give you an introduction to a piece of unfamiliar software: he sits there pointing at anything and everything he sees, as he sees it, telling you lots of inconsequential detail and saying that he’ll tell you more later (or that he’s not going to tell you anything at all because it’s not a beginner’s topic, even though he’s just been pointing out all the buttons for it). As a result, you’re on page 119 before he gets around to showing you how to define a table, and you have to wait until page 245 before he starts talking about how to insert data into it and perform select queries! If you already know something about databases, this approach is just frustrating and irritating; if you don’t (i.e. you’re one of the beginners this book is aimed at) it’s confusing as well. There’s no point being told the function of every button on a toolbar (he takes a hundred words to tell us about the Open, Save and Save As buttons) or every option in an Options dialog, before you’ve seen basic queries in action (e.g. he tells us that “Pressing this button brings up a dialog box to change the values in each of a template’s parameters” well before he shows us queries, let alone code templates!). If you’re going to set up a production database, then of course you need to know about security and administration tasks before you do so, but this is supposed to be a book for beginners (and beginner database developers, not administrators, for that matter): it’s safe to assume that they’d read through quite a lot of stuff in a more logical order and experiment on a test installation before embarking on proper work!

And here’s a sample of his convoluted writing about a pretty simple concept (deciding whether to enforce referential integrity on already existing data when adding a new relationship between tables): “By creating the relationship, you want the data within the relationship to work, therefore you would select No if you were going to go back and fix the data after the additions. What if you still miss rows? Would this be a problem? In preceding our scenario, there should be no transaction records without customer records. But you may still wish to add the relationship to stop further anomalies going forward.” Here’s some more linguistic spaghetti: “However, when including key column(s) from a clustered index in a nonclustered index, because the row pointer is actually the clustered index key, SQL is smart enough not to store the information twice in the nonclustered index, and you can explicitly define the order of the clustered index keys as they are used in the nonclustered index.” If you already understand the concepts he’s trying to explain, you can usually make sense of this stuff (unless he contradicts himself in the space of a few sentences, that is), but this is a book supposed to be aimed at beginners and should present the ideas clearly.

If you want to read something like this, i.e. with little or no thought about how to present the most important ideas simply, quickly and clearly without distracting detail, you might as well save your money and read the Microsoft help files (which are more accurate and better written!). If you’re going to spend money, look elsewhere.
by S. Kane, Rating: 1 / 5

WOW! I picked this book up with hopes of learning SQL and databases in general. I read Microsoft MCDBA book and also half of Microsoft 2000 SQL Server Unleashed Second Edition. I still wasn’t clear about certain things. This book simply is amazing. I couldn’t put it down and first day, I stayed up until 3am reading it. I am on page 200 right now and so far, I understand every topic written so far. The author does excellent job in explaining everything in VERY simple form. He tells you things that you need to know. The book starts off with introduction, then it moves on to Installation of SQL 2005 server. While you read the book, you are building database for financial company/bank from scratch, so this is really nice because you gain experience in doing it if you don’t have a chance to work with it at your job. While you are creating database/tables/etc. the author shows up two ways of doing it. One with SQL Management Studio and then he shows you how to do it with T-SQL. The cool thing about the approach is that author goes over T-SQL code line by line explaining VERY clearly what it does. This is very nice for someone like me who doesn’t have any programming experience and becomes confused the second I see code. I would strongly recommend this book to new people who just want to learn SQL and how things work. It’s great. I am very happy with it. I read many technical books, with my favorite author being Mark Minasi. This book is written in same simple, easy to understand language.

Get this book, setup virtual machine with server 2003 on your computer, download 120 days evaluation version of SQL 2005 from Microsoft website and you are on your way to go. I assure you, you will learn something and you will have fun doing it!

Great job Mr. Dewson. I will search around and purchaser more books written by you!
by Max, Rating: 5 / 5

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