But — if I may — let us try to imagine ourselves on the receiving end of a book buyer too. It’s too early to say (I’m on page 50), but I have a strong first impression that this book is um… not good. Some of the “hacks” appear to be written while being high on drugs! Did you notice how in one of the initial sections the author declares his goal as finding the date on which most widgets were ordered and then he proceeds to solve this problem by MAX’ing on the _date_! Gee, well, he found the latest date, what a surprise — even though more widgets were ordered on an earler date. The he’s off to the next “hack”. How do you do this, I wonder? Or — always a possibility — am I missing something here? In another snippet he creates a view on a table (so that the data can be looked at); then he modifies the table by the stuff from the view while checking that the record id be in the view’s set. But this view is a copy of the table! Logically, that is: physically, it IS the table. So, how can a record NOT be in the set?

That said, I’m no guru, and it’s quite possible that I’m mistaken, so I’m gonna work on it some more, before I unleash let the dogs of war.

One good thing: at least this book forces you to think, just to make sure what looks like errors indeed is errors.

A bit subjective: I wouldn’t call this book “hacks” anything. Hackery, to me, summons an image of a mad genius; something well past the mere solid competence. But nothing in this book appears terribly original. It’s a cookbook of sorts.

All right, checking out for now (but I’ll be back). :-)

;o)