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Title: Fundamentals of Database Systems (5th Edition)
ISBN: 0321369572
Author:
Ramez Elmasri
Shamkant B. Navathe
Publicate Date: 2006-03-17
Publish: 2006-03-17
List Price: $118.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $89.61
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $76.33
Amazon Merchant Price: $89.61
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| Customer Review: |
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1: There are some scratches on the cover
although I ordered a new book, There are some scratches on the cover, and it's looked like is not new
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2: I feel dumber now...
This book is required for my database class; I wish it weren't. The sentence structure is absolutely atrocious. Whatever happened to publishers checking for complete sentences??? Because of the poor sentences, I loose focus and do other things (like write this review).
Surprisingly, this is not the most frustrating part of the book. Why do I need flip hundreds of pages backward to learn a topic or do a problem? The authors rely on you spending more time flipping the pages of their book than actually reading it (this may be intentional since the writing itself is poor).
If you don't have to get this book I wouldn't. Otherwise I feel sorry for you and wish you keep your sanity...
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3: Useless for beginners
Do you remember the 80's "Twilight Zone" episode where a man slowly loses his mind as the people around him start combining words in meaningless sentences, rendering him unable to understand anything in his native language?
That's how I felt while reading this book.
This was the suggested textbook for a course I took on database management systems. After the first chapter, this book rapidly became impossible to understand. Arcane terms are defined, redefined and concatenated in countless combinations, each with different shades of meaning. Concepts are introduced in the text without giving examples in the figures. Worse yet, the answers to the practice problems are not included in the back of the book. (Side note: this is the first time I have ever considered impersonating a college instructor in order to get the solutions manual from the publisher.)
As a supplement (or alternative) to this book, I'd recommend David Kroenke's "Database Concepts" (Prentice Hall, 2nd Edition), as well as C.J. Date's "Introduction to Database Systems" (Addison-Wesley, 6th Edition).
This book has helped kill any enthusiasm I might have had for working with databases. Thank you, Dr. Elmasri!
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4: Comprehensive, but with Errors
Overall, this is a wonderful book for learning how databases work. It doesn't cover the code for all modern database wonders, but hits most of them. Best of all, it provides psuedo code showing how to implement your own methods. However, I did find errors with some of the code, in particular the sorted-merge join algorithm will miss records if the right-hand-side table has multiple matching fields. It was easy to correct, but a mistake on such a fundamental algorithm is hard to overlook. Worst, Pearson doesn't provide an easy-to-find errata site, so I couldn't report the bug or even see if there were others. Addison-wesley never had that problem. Reading this book will make any DBMS make sense under the hood. Finally, I take point away for wordiness. This books is overcomplicated and wordy and doesn't make itself useful to beginning developers. This book tries to be a history book and reference all in one and it can be overwhelming, even to someone who's written his own DBMS before. Half of the chapters seem like unnecessary chatter, just to take up some more pages to rake up the price . . . and what a price!
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5: Good
Good book that explains Database Management Systems and how they work. Would recommend also picking up a book on SQL and/or Oracle.
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