ISBN0-07-295886-3

I read some of the reviews here. The comments varies from a good book to a worthless one.

If you are really interested in making a career out of databases, then this is a book you got to read. An analogy that comes to mind is "You got to have a strong foundation to build a sky craper". This is exactly what this book is. It helps you build a strong foundation.

I got hold of this book when I was in my 4th Semester of my BS in computer science (1994 - 2nd Edition of this book) to clear my Database concepts exam. Ever since, whenever I feel I might not have understood some concept, I go back to this book.

One thing you got to understand is, its not a book that you can just read through and tell people that you have understood the concepts. You need to work the book.

Rgds,
Naveen
IBM DB2 UDB Certified Specialist.

This is a required book for my undergrad Databases class. While reading over it before the semester started I began to wonder why my professor would ever choose such a terrible book. Of course it became clear when, on the first day of class, the professor began to read word for word off slides with the names of the authors sitting at the bottom along with the familiar 'cute' artwork from the cover. Note to instructors: choosing a book because it provides prewritten notes and allows you to be extra lazy is not a valid reason for choosing a textbook. The book is filled with lots of mathematical notation with few good examples. By good examples I mean those that involve realistic databases and not the 'Consider a schema R = (A, B, C, D, E)...' mathematical drivel that fills most of the pages.

This is quite the typical Computer Science textbook, vastly overpriced and lacking any real information. Veteran CS students will be happy to find that even the most simple concepts have been reduced to pure math, this to make sure that creative students who have no passion for math do not have an unfair advantage.

If you can only read math (or prefer that everything in life is described purely in equation form), this is the best book on the market!

This was purchased as the required text book for a cs course on advanced database. Having no prior knowledge of database, the book is a hard read especially rel alg and rel calc sections. I agree with the ground up approach of the reviewer, however, the book is all theory. Already through chapter 6 and still do not now how to create a database. For $100.00 you expect more.

This book is very comprehensive in covering all beginner aspects of database concepts. However, there are so many errors in this book I absolutely had to sell it because I couldn't stand keeping such a book. For the fifth edition I was very disappointed. The ERD symbols were incorrect, and there are typos galore. You actually have to know all about databases to actually read past the errors and understand everything. For someone who doesn't know database concepts, this book will only lead you to make errors when you try and apply the practices. I hope 6th edition is much better.