The first book by Paul Wilton is what you would expect from a book with this title, a step-by-step introduction to SQL. It covers queries, functions, inner and outer joins, table and index creation, constraints and the fundamentals of relational database design. As the database-independent title of the book suggests it focuses on the standard features and functions of SQL that are common to all popular databases. In doing this the author makes the effort to point out where the popular databases vary from the standard. Understandably stored procedures are deemed to be beyond the scope of this book and are not mentioned. The databases covered by the first book are Oracle 10g, MySQL 4.1, SQL Server 2000, DB2 8.1 and Access XP. The book also includes a very handy appendix which explains how to obtain a free evaluation copy of each of these databases and how to install them on Windows.

The second book, by John Colby, covers the more advanced topics of transactions, security and database performance tuning. Unfortunately the second book is written unashamedly only for SQL Server and little or no attempt is made to explain how the same functionality is delivered by other databases. I can't understand this. Wrox has a perfect good book already for those keen to learn about SQL Server by Robert Vieira.

In my view for the next release of the book Wrox should drop the second section of this book altogether, as it doesn’t belong in a beginners’ guide to SQL and instead ask Paul to beef up the chapters on functions and data types, including an overview of the more often used datatypes in the five RDBMSs. In my experience beginners need to know how to use IDENTITY and SEQUENCE generators when they build their first database applications, not security and database performance tuning.