Earlier this year I had to deploy a set of Exchange servers. I am not an MCSE, but I have installed Unix boxes and even hacked sendmail entries, so I figured, how hard should this be? Answer: very.

Exchange has a bezillion options and you'll need an almost zen-like mastery of the application to be successful deploying it. I didn't have the time to build this foundation, and relied heavily on this book to explain some of the arcane concepts.

"Managing MS Exchange Server" is very well indexed and does a pretty good job of explaining some of the obscure registry entries and security options in the product. It also provide the mental "glue" that I needed to see how my Exchange servers would interact.

A few of the registry keys were different as a result of the most recent service packs. This is forgivable given the book's always going to lag the product, and the differences weren't that horrible.

If you're tasked with doing any amount of work with Exchange, you really need this book.

If I had to choose but two MS Exchange books for my arsenal, this would absolutely be one of them. The other would have to be Barry Gerber's "Mastering Exchange Server 5.5"

Paul Robichaux has done an EXCELLENT job of filling in what few gaps Barry Gerber left in his book. Where Gerber provides an excellent guide to setting up and getting to know Exchange, Robichaux takes you deeper into more "advanced" administrative issues such as disaster recovery, security, enabling Exchange for remote users, etc.

If you manage an Exchange server or servers for your orginzation, this book is indispensible. Hats off to the author!

Paul Robichaux's MANAGING MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SERVER is a "must-have" for your bookshelf. It is one of those rare technical books that you can both enjoy by simply sitting down and reading it (cover to cover), or using it as a reference book, when you find your Exchange in trouble. For me, it has already more than paid for itself.

Great reference for all aspects of this subject. Use it every week. Highly recommended for novice-expert.

Its even better than the previous edition. Check my comment in the previous edition's review. Good work Roger Jennings and Group.

Along with Robert Cowart & Kenneth Greg's book on the WindowsNT Bible which is for beginners, this book by Roger Jennings is the BEST that is available for NT.

First of all, let me say that this book is not meant for End-Users, Administrators or Analysts. It is strictly for Developers and Programmers and does not cover the SQL Server 2000's interface, nor its various tools.

This book does contains an in-depth look at SQL Server programming, including Stored Procedures, Cursors, Triggers and ADO. It covers plenty of programming topics and issues, but does not dive into much detail about certain topics that deserve more attention. Also it lacks examples (specifically data output examples) and screen-shots.

Other than that, it is a good book to have, but I would not recommend it to novice programmers. I do however, recommend SQL Server 2000 Programming by Example, which covers a narrower range of topics, but in a lot more detail.

This is a hefty book that so far looks like a good choice for my first SQL Server 2000 book. The core stuff on T-SQL and ADO is solid and does a good job on new features like cascading foreign keys. The additional topics are what have really made this book a good value for me. As examples, this is the first SQL Server book I've found that grapples with Windows 2000 Server Active Directory and how to use it with SQL Server security. The XML coverage is also top notch and got me over several hurdles quickly. Some of the admin areas, like backup and recovery, aren't covered as deeply as in books targeted specifically at DBAs, however.

The writing is very clear and direct and there's lots of example code. Although I've found a few typos, so far the technical information seems accurate. In several places, the authors provide useful tables that bring together information that's spread around different topics in the on-line documentation. I also found their recommendations for specific database settings and coding techniques helpful.

Paul Conte and Michael Otey have written a most excellent reference for SQL Server 2000 development. The examples, explanations, and sample code are precise and easy to understand. As a developer, I think that having a good basic understanding of SQL Server administration is essential, and this book provides just what I need. I recommend this book to any SQL Server 2000 developer.

Be warned that the "Programming Windows Solutions with ADO.Net" chapter (chapter 10) presents only toy applications.

Developers looking for real-world solutions will need to look elsewhere..

Rick's book is the best one I read on VB.NET with SQL Server. The flow of the book is unbeatable. Every chapter is clearly written and well planned to backup the chapters that will follow it. Executing stored procedures from VB.NET is the best part of the book because when I ran the code it worked. Other books I bought (too many of them!!!) do not compare to this book.
The other thing about the author is that he replied to my email about an issue not mentioned in the book as soon as he received it. I strongly recommend this book.

Like most people, I appreciate humor. But when I'm pressed for time and need to learn the nuts and bolts of a programming language, I'd rather an author save his chuckles for his own time. Or her own time. Whatever. Dobson's book is right up my alley. It's serious, but not complicated. The pages are filled with good, technical information, supported by concise examples and efficient diagrams. No wasted space, no wasted words.In contrast, Karl Moore's book (VB .Net: The Tutorials), though quite informative, was annoying in its silliness. This tome served as a refreshing antidote. Of course reasonable people can disagree on the humor thing--the disagreeable can go to Moore's work. In this book, multiple topics are covered well: SQL programming, including the all-powerful stored procedure, Windows application programming, XML programming and ASP.Net programming. Dobson's treatment of SQL in concert with VB .Net should help anyone get up to speed writing DB applications in no time. It is a wonderful text that successfully paints with a broad and serious stroke.

Computer books must sell on weight because so many are filled with unnecessary bumph to add padding. NOT the case with this book, every page is filled with constructive detailed information put into plain English. The knowledge and experience of the authors shines through and I have used much of the wisdom parted with in this book in numerous situations at work - it has a permanent place on my desk. This book also helped me pass the Microsoft SQL Server exams.

I recently inherited an over-due SQL Server 2000 upgrade project, which, it turned out, needed some serious rearchitecting of its data movement strategy. After struggling to find the information I needed in Microsoft's documentation and on Microsoft's tech support web site, I followed a colleague's recommendation and bought this book. The sections on DTS and replication not only laid out the answers I needed in easy-to-understand terms, but also provided examples that I was able to use right away (and learn a lot from!) I credit this book with saving my project!

A great resource book! The real life examples that are presented in this book and the detail instructions on how to build something with SQL Server 2000 are extremely easy to understand and useful. This book is already helping my employee's build a data replication environment and do some complex data transformations using DTS. Some great example code on the CDROM as well.

According to the author this book stands to help novice and experienced NT administrators. I don't think even novice admins would find this book useful, nothing new at all even for me. I also tried it preparing for 70-067 exam and can't recommend it as a study guide ( that's for sure ). Interesting style but I didn't like it. For a conclusion, you can try it .

The NT 4.0 Administrator is a great, easy book to use to gain practical understanding of both NT Server and NT Workstation Operating Systems. It includes outstanding hands-on practical exercises in almost every aspect of administering NT 4.0. I taught the subject using this as my Textbook and the ability of the students to work with the software as they read proved invaluable to their gaining the necessary understanding of the subject.

If you are a beginner or an experienced SQL developer this is the book for you. Full of had to find details and tips

The overeview chapters are the best that I've seen within an introductory PowerBuilder book. The chapters having to do with the Powerscript language are not as good as the overview chapters.

Overeall, a very good book for the beginning PowerBuilder programmer

Pro:

*) Covers a lot of ground on up to date (01/2000) server side tech, Servlets, JSP, RMI, XML, EJB, JINI, CORBA, JNDI, LDAP, JDBC, Mime, cookies, Internationalization.

*) Lots of hands-on details with many examples.

*) Very fluent and usually clear.

Con:

*) Very little on theory, concepts, server architecture using these technologies or trends, goes straight to the details.

*) Many exercises don't work without some hacking (they could still fix it, the code is on their site).

*) So much is about Java Servlets you would think Sun published it.

*) Not all the chapters are in the same level, you can feel many people wrote the book.

This book is one of the must-have books for anyone serious about writing server-side Java programs. Sure you can find a lot of the information on the net, but I don't think that most professionals want to rely just on the net as their only resource now do they? I've had this book for many months now and it's the most popular book at work. It's jam-packed full of good server-side programming ideas and techniques. And it covers a lot of the bases with enough depth to get you more than started.

There are over ten chapters dealing with Servlets. There is only one chapter on JSP (29 pages), but anything you need to know about JSP you can get out of that one chapter. Servlets are what you should be concerned about anyway as you are looking for a hardcore Java Server Programming book right? The chapter on Smart Servlets is a better approach than JSP anyway.

The book isn't just about Servlets, however. There's also good coverage of XML, Distributed Computing with Servlets (using RMI), and Enterprise Javabeans. And more!

Want a big bonus this year? Get this book! Want to eventually lose your job and end up at McDonalds? Don't get this book. It's nice to know you have choices. :)

Everything you need to get started with server-side Java programming is in this book. It starts off with several chapters covering Servlets, then a solid chapter on JSP, followed by coverage of JDBC, and a chapter on database connection pools. This would have been enough for a complete book, but it doesn't stop there. There is also good coverage of XML, RMI, JNDI, EJB, and more.

To me, this book is an essential reference for anyone doing server-side Java programming. It has been an invaluable resource on my current programming project. I continually recommend it to my co-workers.

The book has a good balance of example code and explanations, and the authors generally have very good writing styles which make the technical material relatively easy to understand. However, at times you can tell that the book has many authors because not all of the chapters are of the same quality. In particular, I though chapters 5 and 6 were not as well written as most of the others.

One minor criticism of the book is that even though it is over 1,000 pages it is printed in a rather small font which made it a little hard to read. I would have preferred that one or two of the less important chapters be excluded so that a normal font size could have been used.

This book is also a great value for the price. Many technical books don't cover half as much material for the same price. I highly recommend it.

A "Comprehensive Problem Solver" it is not. The SQL Server 2000 Black Book is full of good information on theories and principles, and at the end of each chapter is a good amount of examples and solutions for particular situations. The examples do help you ,sort of, understand how to build your own SQL commands, but if you want to know WHAT those commands you typed in really means, you may want to buy another book.

This book is supposed to be for Immediate to Advanced users and as toted a "problem solver". It's not. It seems like a good beginners book.

I have two examples to discuss:
1) If/Else logic. Granted as a programmer I know how this stuff works, but they use the flow control statements throughtout the book, but never explain IF/Else statements. Considering how important If/Else statements are in programming, this is a major weakpoint.

2) Stored Procedures. Chapter 14 of the book is supposed to cover Stored Proceduures. Well, it talks about it, and there are examples at the end of the book. But that chapter has more discussions than hardcore examples that it really depressed me about the book. It seemed to me that some of this chapter was probably taken from the manuals. If you wanted to understand Stored Procedures, this book won't help.

Overall, it has some good points if you are beginning, bad points if you want a good programming/breakdown type of book.

Yet Another Big Fat Book. It has become an aggravating trend in the industry and this is one example among a myriad of clones.

Why is this just another big fat book? Page margins are about an inch and a half all around. The font is bigger than my two year old son's readers. A big cardboard flap holds two compact disks, one in the middle of the book and one at the end, that guarantees the book will never lay flat even after ripping them out. The CD's hold nearly useless timed evaluation copies of software that requires far more time to master. The pages are heavy bond, arguably to make the book fat as fat spines stand out on the shelf. The book covers a good deal of topics, but with less than 1000 words dedicated to any given one. Typos abound. The spellchecker calls the i386 architecture the 1386 (one three eight six) architecture in a half-dozen places.

The audience this book is aimed at might appreciate a light introduction without getting caught up details, so I'm giving it a three star. Like other reviews said, strictly beginner and in no way authoritative on any given topic. You'll need to make another purchase if you're looking to scratch the surface of SQL Server 2000.

Too much of a limited revamp of BOL. Just beginner's only.