Steve Jones' review is accurate but misses the target audience of the book. The book is for people who are not programmers and not DB types. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone reading this forum because it is too basic.

That said, I have bought probably a hundred copies of the 1st and 2nd edition of this book for classes I teach to people here at work. It is an ideal introduction to T-SQL for those people who are comfortable using computers and need to know a little bit about queries but don't plan on writing them very often.

The writing in the first two editions book is very good -brief but clear. Each chapter does literally take only 10 minutes to go through.

As for books for people who are new to SQL Server but not new to the technical world. Here are my recommendations:

Rob Vieira's written Beginning SQL Server 2005 Programming and Professional SQL Server 2005 Programming. Both are well-written and cover a wide range of topics at an intermediate level of depth. You'll learn about creating a stored procedure, views, and triggers. There are chapters on normalization, Reporting Services, Integration Services, etc. Overall, these are good books for getting a good understanding about a concept or object. Then if you find you need more detailed information you can use that understanding to look in Books onLine or elsewhere. The difference between the Beginning book and the Professional book is mostly topic selection. So the Professional version has a chapter on Security, Cursors, and .Net which the Beginning book does not. Also, the books are not focussed on Administration or Peformance work.