Rating: 
Summary: To hell!
Review: Whoever wrote this deserve in hell! Base on the organization of my class: Intro to database--Chapter 1 and 2 did an ok job on that. But 3/4 of the class didn't know what the hell it was about. The reason is that the book goes straight into "WHY USE A DATABASE?" SOB. Why would anyone go into "WHY" before defining what it is? If he(Kroenke) is not defining what a database is, how would anyone ever know what a database is? This shot dead couple people (some dropped the class). Entity Relationship--Man. I am not sure whether the book is intended to torture people or not. Most are IDEF1X models. But the instructor insisted that we need to learn EER. What the F*ck? I mean this is so screwed. The book only has couple examples on EER. I am not sure the author is trying to invent (maybe it is misleading) some stuffs or not. It is saying when people refer to ER it meant EER; ER is not referring to Peter Chen's ER model. Holy sh*t. What on earth is this guy thinking? Normalization--Jesus Christ! The definition of first, second, third, and fourth normal form is so passive. It has all these colorful(awful) tables spread around over the chapter to apply the norm form concepts. This is chopped liver. The organization is messed up. And the guy is trying to play with surrogate key--what it is, how to implement it, etc. Why would anyone not explain primary key, candidate key, and superkey before go into surrogate key? I ended up reading stuffs on the Internet and borrowing books from the library. If a textbook can't convey the knowledge we needed, why would we use it? The class only uses 20% of the material. And only 30% of this 20% is useful. So it turns out only 6% of the book applied to our class. Give me a break! The list below is unused:
-Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL), The instructor actually asked us to use another text for this--A Guide to SQL, Philip J. Pratt.
-Using SQL in Application
-Database Redesign
-Managing Multi-User Database
-Managing Databases with Oracle 9i
-Managing Databases with SQL Server 2000
-ODBC, OLE DB, ADO, and ASP
-XML and ADO.NET
-JDBC, Java Server Pages, and MySQL
-Sharing Enterprise Data
-Object-Oriented Database Process Some of these stuffs do not belong to a database textbook! For example, programming stuffs like Java, ASP, .NET, etc. These belong to other classes. And it includes individual products like Microsoft Access, Oracle, MySQL, etc. These belong to IT training camps and not in a database concept course. There are more if you look carefully. This guy(Kroenke) is trying to compile an database encyclopedia. But he failed miserably. You give me 120 dollars while I hand over 6 dollars to you!
Rating:
Summary: Zero Points are too many
Review: Without question, this is the most obscenely overpriced and worthless book I've ever bought.
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