I just started going through the free chapter... glad to see there's some consideration for writing good code in there... maybe there's more in the rest of the book, but most of the tuning recommendations revolve around hardware, indexes, and a couple of things to avoid like unnecessary ORDER BY's... all of which are mute points in the presence of real crap code.

The chapter also seems to have a high implication for GUI interfaced code... not much on batch code where the really big performance problems creep in. That fact is exemplified by the demo of sp_ExecuteSQL which really only benefits the necessary repetative RBAR nature of GUI code.