Daniel G. Goyette said
I purchased this book as soon as it was released, and used it as my exclusive study material for the exam. I took my exam today and passed by a healthy margin. Although I use SQL Server on a daily basis at my job, much of the content of the exam goes beyond my typical day-to-day development tasks, and I don't believe I would have passed the exam had I not used this material to prepare for it.
The only bad thing I have to say about this book involves the Practice Tests provided on the CD. Very frequently, questions would deal with topics that simply were not covered in the book itself. Typically the questions would ask for highly specific syntax to perform fairly obscure tasks. The questions direct you to the chapter and section of the book where the topic is covered, but it was very common for me to find no reference at all to a question's topic when I referred to that section (or when I search the PDF version of the book.) The good news is that each test question, and its answers, are fully explained. But the bad news is that I felt like the practice questions were testing me on materials that simply weren't discussed in the book. This made me feel unprepared for the exam, and it made me question whether the book was incomplete, or if the practice questions were actually beyond the scope of the exam.
In the end, the actual exam had none of the obscure questions I had grown used to seeing on the practice exams, and I believe that every question on the exam itself was covered adequately in the book. So if you're studying for this exam, and you feel like the practice tests are causing you to reconsider taking it, you should probably give the exam a shot. I got a 10% better score on the actual exam than I did on the best practice test I took from the CD.
A. Bransky said
I've barely looked at the book itself but it seems decent. I'm giving it one star though because I mainly bought it for the practice tests that come on the CD, and the questions are so poorly worded (among other things) that the publisher needs to know to take action for the next edition. For example, in one question they say the columns are called column1 and column2, but in the answers the columns are called Col1 and Col2. This may seem like it's not a big deal, but keep in mind that there are questions where certain answers are incorrect because of "minor" details like that.
S. Kondamadugula said
This is a very good book not only from the exam point of view but for any person who wants to know more about T-SQL and SQL Server 2008. There are some good points concerning the basic topics like Indexes, TRY CATCH, Windows PowerShell, just to name a few which even very experienced programmers don't know about. So, it is good to have this book.
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