Path: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu!spool.maxwell.syr.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!postnews.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nf3.bellglobal.com!ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Bob Badour User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: A good book References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 22 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 22:32:15 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 142.176.114.26 X-Complaints-To: abuse@aliant.net X-Trace: ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca 1152225135 142.176.114.26 (Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:32:15 ADT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 19:32:15 ADT Organization: Sympatico-Subscriber Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:43132 Chris Smith wrote: > Hi, > > Let's say you met someone who has a strong mathematical background, a > long history of development of mainly business application software, a > perfectly fine understanding of writing SQL queries in practical > settings. This person understands that OO languages are somewhat > arbitrary, but not particularly convinced that they are evil. > Similarly, he is not convinced of the need for writing significant > amounts of code in declarative style, nor that the existence of a simple > formal mathematical model behind relational databases is necessarily > exploitable to produce better software. Let's further say that you > could get said person to read one book. What would it be? > > (Yes, this is somewhat autobiographical...) That's a difficult one. I don't know whether I would say Fabian Pascal's _Practical Issues..._ or Date/Darwen's _TTM_ or maybe one of Date's earlier _Writings..._ books. Perhaps it would be better to just direct him to the EWD archive at utexas.