Re: New to Databases-books on databases

Joe Trubisz wrote:

> If you're an end user and plan on doing real world things, I'd go with
> Date.
> It's basically the 'standard'.
>
> If you want more of an academic background, Ullman or Silbershatz are
> both good
> books.

I taught with Silbershatz four times, and it never went well. Lots of typographical errors, and lots of concepts glossed over. The feedback I got from students was that they weren't getting a lot out of it. I ended up using the book as no more than background reading. For students who were looking for more, I told them to look at either Date (for a more in-depth approach) or Celko's Data and Databases & SQL for Smarties (for a less rigorous approach). I got good feedback from students regarding all three.

My department just adopted Fundamentals of Database Systems by Elmasri & Navathe. I haven't read the entire thing -- so far I've just spent a weekend with it, but it seems to be clear, thorough and current. It gets into a lot of stuff (mining, warehousing, web-based) that other books omit, and its coverage of non-relational models seems good. Its more rigorous than Celko, but less so than Date (though it's not lacking in rigor when explaining relational algebra, tuple calculus or normalization). I'm looking forward to teaching with it this fall.

Larry Coon
University of California
larry_at_assist.org
and lmcoon_at_home.com Received on Mon Aug 13 2001 - 17:25:20 CEST