Acknowledgments


Writing a book in a language that is neither your native language nor the language of the country where you live requires an optimism that (in retrospect) borders on insanity. Fortunately, Peter Robson, whom I had met at several conferences as a fellow speaker, brought to this book not only his knowledge of the SQL language and database design issues, but an unabated enthusiasm for mercilessly chopping my long sentences, placing adverbs where they belong, or suggesting an alternative to replace a word that was last heard in Merry England under the Plantagenets.[*]

[*] For readers unfamiliar with British history, the Plantagenet dynasty ruled England between 1154 and 1485.

Being edited by Jonathan Gennick, the best-selling author of the O'Reilly SQL Pocket Guide and several other noted books, was a slightly scary honor. I discovered in Jonathan an editor extremely respectful of authors. His professionalism, attention to detail, and challenging views made this book a much better book than Peter and I would have written on our own. Jonathan also contributed to give a more mid-Atlantic flavor to this book (as Peter and I discovered, setting the spelling checker to "English (US)" is a prerequisite, but not quite enough).

I would like to express my gratitude to the various people, from three continents, who took the time to read parts or the whole of the drafts of this book and to give me frank opinions: Philippe Bertolino, Rachel Carmichael, Sunil CS, Larry Elkins, Tim Gorman, Jean-Paul Martin, Sanjay Mishra, Anthony Molinaro, and Tiong Soo Hua. I feel a particular debt towards Larry, because the concept of this book probably finds its origin in some of our email discussions.

I would also like to thank the numerous people at O'Reilly who made this book a reality. These include Marcia Friedman, Rob Romano, Jamie Peppard, Mike Kohnke, Ron Bilodeau, Jessamyn Read, and Andrew Savikas. Thanks, too, to Nancy Reinhardt for her most excellent copyedit of the manuscript.

Special thanks to Yann-Arzel Durelle-Marc for kindly providing a suitable scan of the picture used to illustrate Chapter 12. Thanks too, to Paul McWhorter for permission to use his battle map as the basis for the Chapter 6 figure.

Finally, I would like to thank Roger Manser and the staff at Steel Business Briefing for supplying Peter and me with an office and much-needed coffee for work sessions in London, halfway between our respective bases, and Qian Lena (Ashley) for providing me with the Chinese text of the Sun Tzu quote at the beginning of this book.




The Art of SQL
The Art of SQL
ISBN: 0596008945
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 143

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