Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming (Professional)

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming from Wrox is a well formatted programming reference book for medium to advanced SQL Developers. The chapters are laid out well with useful examples. Especially, I liked the chapters on XML Integration, Advanced Queries, Index structure and Transaction & Locks. I will suggest this book to anyone who is from other RDBMS background to get up and running with programming in SQL Server. However, I was looking for information in Service Broker in detail as this is one of the programming areas which scales SQL Server to different level. Chapters such as Replication, Performance Tuning, Data Warehousing and Reporting were not explained in great detail. However the book solves it's purpose to provide a general guideline on SQL Server 2008 programming. I will recommend this book for other SQL Server professionals who want to understand the new programming features in SQL Server 2008 and also keep this book as reference in their SQL Server library

This book is written for SQL Server 2008. However, it does maintain roots going back a few versions and looks out for backward compatibility issues with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000. These versions are old enough that there is little to no time spent on them except in passing.

The book is oriented around developing on SQL server. Most of the concepts are agnostic to what client language you use although the examples that leverage a client language general do so in C#. For those who are migrating from early versions of SQL Server, some “gotchas” that exist any time a product has versions are discussed to the extent that they seem to be a genuinely relevant issue.

This book assumes that you have some experience with SQL Server and are at an intermediate to advanced level. The orientation of the book is highly developer focused. While there is a quick reference-oriented appendix, there is very little coverage given to beginner level topics. It is assumed that you already have experience with data manipulation language (DML) statements and know the basics of the mainstream SQL Server objects (views, stored procedures, user defined functions, etc.). If you would like to brush up on your knowledge before diving into this book, the author recommends reading Beginning SQL Server 2008 Programming first. There is very little overlap between the Beginning and Professional books and they are designed to work as a pair.

Master the increasingly complex feature set of the latest release of Microsoft SQL Server with the information in Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming. Review the new features of SQL Server that will be of interest to you as an experienced developer and move on to more detailed, practical code examples. Learn how to write complex queries, build different types of data structures, improve application speed and performance, manage advanced scripting and errors, and design advanced databases the latest edition of this valuable programming guide.