SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

William StanekMicrosoft Press

William Staneck has a simple technique. it is to encomapass everything a busy professional needs to know in a reasonably small book. He has done a number of books now covering a range of topics, for a number of different publishers. Either there is a whole lot of technical authors all called william Stanek, or else this guy drinks an awful lot of coffee. For me, however it is the SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Pocket Consultant that stands out. I have to say that none of his books fit in any of my pockets. Perhaps pockets are bigger and deeper across the water. I refuse to believe that William R Stanek actually has the time to understand what he writes about. However, he has the admirable skill of distilling the voluminous documentation that surrrounds a product such as Exchange Server,IIS, or SQL Serveran boil it down to the essentials

I have to admit that I love this book. This is because I hate doing this sort of routine DBA work and filling my poor small brain with all the numbingly boring details of how do do backups, replication and so on. It is all there in the pages of the book. It is therefore very reassuring to carry the thing around with you, despite looking a figure of fun with the thing stuffed into your trouser pocket.

You will look in vain for tips or wrinkles, undocumented commands, explanations of XML. This is all about the straightforward Administration of SQL Server, and it is all laid out in the way the Army would train a squaddie to strip a machine-gun.

I've lost count of the times I've found the quick answer within these pages to a question I should have known the answer to in the first place

William Stanek aint no Rudyard Kipling, but then he doesn't set out to be

I've got his 'Windows 2000 Administrator's pocket Buuk'. It is extraordinarily useful. I don't know about anyone else but I find the whole issue of Windows  User and group accounts rather difficult to understand, and I'm often grateful for having a little peek at the book before tacking any task involving user permissions.. It is a shame it doesn't fit in the pocket, isn't it. I'd like a book with a reasonable-sized print which fits in the pocket. The O'Reilly guides really fit in the pocket. The Microsoft ones are suffering the sort of bloat that most Microsoft products suffer from. The only trouble is that I can't upgrade my suit with larger pockets as I'll end up looking like a blimp with legs or some strange terrestial jellyfish. One risks industrial injury picking the damned Pocket Consultants up!