10 Projects You Can Do with Microsoft SQL Server 7
Karen Watterson, Garth N. Wells, Joe Celko · CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2000
From the Book: Karen Watterson is one of those people whom you can learn about by doing a Web search on her name. She has been around for awhile and worn a lot of hats over the years in the Computer Trade press. Be ready for a few hundred hits. The lady knows what she is doing. Now, your question is why should you be buying a book with a title that sounds like the 1999 movie Ten Things I Hate about You (a comedy which was an updated version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew). The answer is simple. You probably just got a SQL Server database project. You don't know what you are doing, so you will have to learn from mistakes. There are two kinds of these tutorial mistakes in life: yours and someone else's. Learn from someone else's mistakes, not your own. It is much cheaper. There is an attitude that once you have a database installed, you are pretty much finished with the project. All that other stuff-i.e., applications-will be written by a herd of low wage kids armed with the GUI front end tool de jour. It does not work that way in the real world. What Karen and her co-authors do for each chapter that is so good and unique, as far as I know, is lay out the project like a cookbook. At the start of each project, you are given a short name for the project, the goal of the project and the supply list. Terms are defined immediately, and tools available for the SQL Server that you will need are listed and described. The descriptions of the tools are heavy on the technology and the performance. The motivation for the tools is heavy on history, not on theory. That is, you might be told that Ted Codd invented the relational model, but you will not lapse into pages of the mathematicsbehind the relational model. You get chunks of real code, with little notes like, will be useful in the such and such module later, so you don't waste anything. Obviously, the ten projects are not full software packages, but each project is a pretty good basic starter that will get you going. So, how do you use this book? Find your project, read the chapters, then stick some Post-It notes on the parts you are going to code first. Hide the book in your desk drawer, so nobody will know that you are not the brilliant original thinker that you are pretending to be. Take credit for Karen's and her co-authors' work. Ask for a raise when you come in under budget and ahead of schedule.