Be advised that in this book, the author is in a hurry to get to advanced concepts. Only the first three chapters could be called basic. After that, it quickly climbs to advanced material before (in my opinion) sufficiently covering basic and intermediate material. By Chapter 14, the subject is, "Advanced Stored Procedure Programming". But I still can't find what I need in 1-3. Then, as if it is even more advanced, the next subject (Chap 15) is "Debugging". Please, when will we have an author who sees that debugging is a progressively learned process? Perhaps there should be a section in a chapter early on covering debugging of basic stuff.
My background as a programmer of relational databases and writing SQL statements goes back over fifteen years. As my reports and SQL statements have gotten more complex to please the customer, I have had to move into writing stored stored procedures to meet the need for speed. My intent was to get a book that would help me get my SQL statements to work as Stored Procedures. This book appeared to match my customer's software make-up (MS SQL Server, Stored Procedures, .Net, T-SQL, etc) as well as being written in a fairly straightforward and easy to understand manner (it does get a big plus on that!). But if you haven't been writing stored procedures for a year or more, and you have little staff assistance where you are, I would not recommend this book. If on the other hand, you have been doing SP's for a few years or have lots of staff help and want to go the next step, this book may be for you. I'm going to get another one that will help get the basics to work.