SQL Pocket Guide by Jonathan Gennick is a small pocket sized guide published by O’Reilly. The book isn’t really meant to be a learning guide and more of a quick memory refresher for something not commonly used. There’s very little fluff in the this small tome on the different SQL implementations in DB2, MS SQL, MySQL and Oracle and PostgreSQL.

The amount of information in the book is very good compared to many other books of similar style. The author stays completely on task and doesn’t waste any time on cheesy jokes. CRUD, and all of the joins are well covered in the book.

The book suffers from the flaw of not usually having details on previous implementations of the different DBMS. For example, there’s a lot of legacy MS SQL stuff that isn’t always immediately deprecated in the next version which could still be useful.

Overall, the book is fairly well organized. There are some things missing that are really quite frustrating: DDL, User Permissions, etc. I use the book regularly (maybe once a week) to quickly refresh my memory on something I’ve forgotten or haven’t used regularly. I sincerely believe the book has helped me save hours of my time and be a much more efficient programmer.