Author/s : Bill Karwin
Publisher : Pragmatic Bookshelf
Category :
Data modeling, SQL and JDBC
Review by : Deepak Bala
Rating : 9 horseshoes
SQL anti-patterns wield their heads in many forms. This book covers them in breath (application / queries / models). The author assumes that the reader already knows SQL, so no time is wasted in jumping into the first anti-pattern.
The writing style of this book reminds me a little of 'Head first design
patterns'. Each anti-pattern is structured into various sections such as Scenarios / How to detect the anti-pattern / Valid use cases for the pattern / Solutions to avoid it. The narrative style adopted by the book makes it easy to read. You can picture an angry boss looking over an engineer's shoulder with every anti-pattern
The topics covered give the book good breadth. Everything is discussed from using bcrypt to hash your passwords, to the folly of using ambiguous groups and how single value returns play a role in them.
I found pleasure in learning new functions like GROUP_CONCAT() and alternate solutions to getting hierarchical queries to work right. Anyone with sound previous knowledge of SQL should be able to make quick work of this book.
I'd definitely recommend it to a fellow programmer.
More info at Amazon.com 
