Cooper Alvin

I'd be willing to bet that Cooper Alvin is an alias, and not the native New Yorker that his Amazon author page says he is. There are far too many bumbling English sentences for a native English speaker (plus an editor) to have made. The last sentence of the book makes this point rather well: "We hope this book helped you in your strive to learn SQL programming language."

In addition to many typos and stultifying language, this little book managed to be verbose in its 76 pages. An entire show more chapter ("Knowing Databases", pp. 11-16) gives brief (and entirely unnecessary) histories of MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, and MS Access (!), including lengthy bulleted lists of such attributes as "Read Consistency", "Concurrency", "Locking Mechanisms", "Table Compression", "Parallel Execution", and the like--none of which are appropriate for the target audience (i.e., someone who is a rank SQL beginner). There's no explanation, just over-the-head-of-the-audience lists.

I read this via my Kindle Unlimited subscription, so with some mental accounting I can think about the cost as "free." Had I paid explicitly for this item, my rating would be lower. There is some value in the organization of basic SQL information, but it can be done much better, and is in fact with titles such as SQL: QuickStart Guide - The Simplified Beginner's Guide to SQL. show less