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9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 A book you'll keep as a referenceAug 30, 2000
By G. Stark
After looking at the books used by the local LA Universities and Colleges to teach the subject, I felt very sad for the CS, and IT students of these schools. Lectures are one thing, having a good textbook is the other. It's the great textbook that doesn't go back for a refund after the quarters over. All I could find where books on Access programming. "Learn Access in 21 days", just does not do justice to Normalization theory. Books on SQL seem only to rehash syntax and provide the occasional example. I looked all over for a book that hit on the important topics a programmer, DB Analysts, or DB Administrator needs to know independent of the platform. Ample theory is presented here in an understandable way so those key concepts can be used to develop solutions to real world problems.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Wordy, redundant, tedious, still a good coverageOct 10, 2001
I agree that this book could be well resumed in 300 pages. Too much text, too few figures. For instance, when you make a classification or an enumeration of things that have long definitions, it is a good idea to organize them in a bullet-list or numbered list or something similar, instead of just plain text. If you constanly fail to use such synthetic representations, the result is made of large chunks of plain text, hard to read, tedious, redundant.Also, you can use more visual indicators that give you an instant information about various pieces of text: bold text, spaces, various font sizes and shapes, icons, etc, so that the reader can focus on particular sections of such a big book. They call it Readability, and it's far from being great here. There are also some points left unfinished: when you read "The first idea would be to...", you expect that the second idea follows sometime. Well, there are exceptions in this book. I like the idea of mixing theory with industry examples in the same book, but please make a clear separation. Sometimes I can't say whether a particular sentence refers to such a real system or it is a theoretical statement. In conclusion, this book features a good coverage of the subject but also a lack of organization and readability.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 A book for the lowest common denominator Oracle aspirerDec 14, 2009
By angel.white
"like the storm and the flame, like the rocks and the sky, i simply am -cassandra nova"
Damning Factors:
1) The book completely ignores that there are other DB's than Oracle, DB2, and Informix. No MySQL, no PosgreSQL, no SQLite, no CouchDB (okay, PostgreSQL gets a 1 paragraph head nod on page 177).
2) This book is made for the lowest possible set of people who might be interested in the subject. If you have any knowledge, or are decently intuitive, then you'll tear your hair out with this book.
For example, if you know any programming, you realize that primitive variables (ie int) always have a value. In the DB, though, they can be null (meaning there is no value), so a primitive int cannot represent all values the DB may store. To accommodate this, you submit a second variable, essentially a boolean to hold whether or not the value is null. Pretty straight forward, right? I figured it out in the first paragraph of the section, but 5 paragraphs later they still hadn't gotten around to saying it. I looked at the code example, it fit my conclusion, so then I tried to skim the massive quantity of text to try and find where they said it, to verify my intuition. It took me several minutes, because they split it across several paragraphs.
That is the problem with this book, really. It is verbose, it is tedious, there is so much text, and even if you know what you want, and you know where the book talks about it, you still have a lot of difficulty getting that information out of the book.
Maybe if you were brand new to programming, brand new to databases, had very little intuition, and really needed to read every paragraph, this would be a good book. But if you're really in that boat, shouldn't you spend some time learning about programming first?
As a result of this writing style, **IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO USE THIS BOOK AS A REFERENCE**
3) They spend a lot of time talking about Relational Algebra, which is a complete waste of time since it is purely academic, noone actually uses it. On top of that, switching mindsets from Relational Algebra to SQL is a bit rough, because you approach querying in very different ways, thus you must think about the problem in very different ways (it's like those video games where you eat the bad mushroom that switches your keys to the opposite directions). But the most annoying thing is that they talk about it like it's super complicated, but all it is is set theory. If they said "it's set theory, the same thing you learned in discrete math, here's the syntax" then they could have dispensed with it in a week, but because it's aimed at the lowest common denominator, it drug on for a month.
4) This book approaches writing programs that deal with the DB in a poor way, IMO. They use C, a static language that can't anticipate run-time differences, and would require a huge amount of infrastructure to even be able to comprehend your schema (the structure of your DB). To get around this, they use an absolutely wretched bug-ridden code generator called PRO*C, which needs to nanny your entire application in order to work right, extremely limiting. C is a completely horrible language for this type of application, something even halfway dynamic would have been infinitely better, and something object oriented seems almost necessary. My group of 3 members spent over 80 hours in a period of two extremely frustrating days trying to get PRO*C to work correctly (almost 15 hours each day of misery), before we finally decided to abandon the book / instructor's approach, and switch languages / frameworks altogether.
5) The thing is seriously enormous. After a while I quit bringing it to school with me, because it would make my shoulder ache carrying it in my bag.
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Redeeming Factors:
1) There were a large number of examples. They weren't always good examples, usually they didn't show what I needed (too simple), but there were quite a few, which was something at least.
2) They showed the EBNF of the SQL statements, which most of the time, between the EBNF and the simplistic examples was enough for me to figure out how to do what I was wanting to do, if not, a little experimenting / googling to supplement the book.
3) There really is a lot of information in there. It's hard to get out of the book, and it will take way longer than it should to learn, but it seems to hit a fairly significant portion of relevant information.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Database: Principles, Programming, PerformanceJun 22, 2002
By Alan Mugabi
This is one of the best books on the subject.
It gives a thorough and solid foundation on the databases. It helped me quickly identify the weaknesses and strengths in all the leading DBMS products but above all, realized that 80% of all the experts out there in the field, don't know what they are doing. However, if you have a short attention span, are intimidated by certain dry material and used to books like Databases in 24hrs, this book is not for you.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Poor writing but many various examplesJan 12, 2004
By Jeremy M. Herback
Pros:
- many examples
- examples for various databases (Oracle, DBQ, etc.) Cons:
- poorly written, wordy
- difficult to read
- gives examples for various databases, but each example does
not have a version for each database -> if you want to
learn on a specificat database, you will have holes in the
examples Overall: Poor book, would not recommend
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