This week I came home from work to find a unexpected package waiting for me. When I opened it, I found a copy of Kevin Kline’s (blog/twitter/website) latest edition of SQL in a Nutshell. I forget now exactly how the topic came up, but at some point in the past Kevin offered to send me a copy of the book. I think it started at PASS last year where I mentioned that as a part of my job, I also am the backup to our Oracle DBA, and one of my biggest problems in working with Oracle is that I don’t know the minute syntactical differences in the SQL Language, so I often have to search online to figure out the right way to do things.
Now I have to openly admit, I have only had this book for two days, but in that short time, I have to say that I’d recommend this book hands down to anyone who works in one or more of the RDBMS’s covered in the book; SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostGreSQL. Its not really a book that you will sit down and read cover to cover, but if you need a fast reference for SQL syntax so far, in my short time using it, this is really an great book.
My hats off to Kevin for the hard work that I know went into this book, especially with it being in its third edition.
I guess now I don’t really have an excuse to not make use of my 10 free MySQL databases on my hosting account.