Kevin Kline’s SQL in a Nutshell (like many of the technical books from O’Reilly) is one of those essential desktop reference books that every programmer should have access to; it covers several different flavors of SQL, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. The nice thing about this book is that it uses the 2003 ANSI SQL as the foundation, and then attempts to tie in the various flavors back to that source. While this gives you a great overall picture of how the various database platforms interact with another, it does make it a bit difficult to translate from one dialect to another. In other words, if you know how CHARINDEX works in SQL Server, it’s difficult using the book to figure out a comparable function in MySQL.
Despite this limitation, this book does provide a very useful codex for the major dialects of SQL. IT’s worth having a copy if you are skilled on one platform and need to interact with another flavor of SQL.
3 of 5 stars.
