Chapter 1: Introduction 3
D_Base / SQL Server 2000 Stored Procedure & XML Programming / Sunderic / 222896-2 / Chapter 1
Who Should Read This Book
This book has been written to fill this gap, and thus it has been written with a wide
audience in mind. Ideally, it will be neither the first nor the last book you read on SQL
Server, but it may be the one you refer to and recommend the most. Above all, this book
has been written to help professional developers get the most out of SQL Server stored
procedures and SQLXML extensions and to produce quality work for their clients.
If you are an experienced SQL Server developer, you will find this book to be an
essential reference text full of tips and techniques to help you address the development
issues you encounter in the course of your day-to-day development activities.
If you have some experience with SQL Server development, but substantially more in
other programming environments such as Visual Basic, you will find this book useful as
a tool to orient yourself with the SQL Server environment and become proficient more
quickly with SQL Server stored procedure and SQLXML concepts and methods. You
will be able to incorporate effective, swift stored procedures into Visual Basic code and
SQLXML methods and queries into your client Windows or web applications.
If you are a novice SQL Server developer, the concepts, tips, and techniques you
will learn in reading this book and working through the exercises will help you attain
the knowledge, skills, and good habits that will help you become an accomplished
professional.
I hope that this book remains close to your workstation for a long time. Indeed, in the
course of this book’s useful life, you may in turn be all three of the users just described.
What You Will Find in This Book
Each chapter in this book (aside from the one you are reading, which is introductory
in nature) will provide conceptual grounding in a specific area of the SQL Server
development landscape. The first 12 chapters are dedicated to stored procedure
programming, and Chapters 13, 14, and 15 are focused on XML programming on
SQL Server 2000.
As you may have gathered, this chapter describes the content of this book, as well
as its intended audience, and describes a sample database that we will use throughout
the book to demonstrate stored procedure development.
Chapter 2, “The SQL Server Environment,” provides a 30,000-foot overview of
the Transact-SQL language, SQL Server tools, and stored procedure design.
Chapter 3, “Stored Procedure Design Concepts,” explores SQL Server stored
procedure design in greater detail, with particular attention paid to the different
types of stored procedures, their uses, and their functionality.
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