Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers_ From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice)

'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 betw